Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news, information, and analysis to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.

Cybersecurity is getting more complicated, and so is the job of being a cybersecurity partner. It’s no longer enough to be an expert in one particular technology or product. Increasingly, customers are looking to partners to understand how different technologies work together, how to integrate them into a broader security strategy, and how to turn all of that into meaningful business outcomes.

But for partners, particularly smaller VARs and MSPs, there’s a challenge there. How do you build the technical expertise customers need without spreading your resources too thinly? Where should you specialize? And how do you turn those investments in skills into opportunities for growth?

Those are some of the questions we’re exploring today with Robert May, executive vice president of technology and product management at Fortinet.

In this sponsored edition of In The Channel, we’ll discuss the changing demands on cybersecurity partners, the growing role of managed services, and how partners can make smart decisions about developing their technical capabilities.

We’ll also take a look at Fortinet’s XPERTS 26 Canada event, taking place in Montreal later this month, and how its hands-on training approach fits into the company’s broader partner enablement strategy.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Robert May.

Robert Dutt: Robert, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Robert May: Thanks so much for having me.

Robert Dutt: I want to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about technology, technology enablement, and building up the skills that partners need. The Fortinet portfolio has expanded a lot. No surprise, because the cybersecurity attack surface has expanded a lot as well.

How has that changed what’s expected of a partner by customers today? What do partners need to be good at today that perhaps wasn’t so important just a few years ago?

Robert May: As you mentioned, the technology has expanded significantly. Partners now need to understand how the different pieces fit together so they can become a trusted advisor for the customer.

End customers are also struggling with a lack of skills and resources, so they need to rely on partners as an extension of their team. For the partner, they need to know a lot more different components than they did in the past.

If I’ve got 10 or 20 different products in my security operations, I need to string these together into an operation or workflow. That’s the level where partners can really help customers build those integrations, do things efficiently, add automation, and so forth. It’s really understanding that end-to-end picture.

Robert Dutt: How do you find partners are doing? Acknowledging there are going to be some who are probably ahead of the game and some who are lagging behind, as a collective group, how would you say partners are doing on getting that platform message and being able to communicate and integrate that whole story for customers?

Robert May: It’s an evolution. People don’t usually like to pitch or present stuff they’re not comfortable with, but they start to see the need to do that because the things they’re selling, or that they’re more traditionally comfortable with, connect to a lot of other technologies that they need to talk about together as one solution.

I think customers today are asking for solution-based projects, not individual components. The partners are moving that way, but it takes time, of course.

Robert Dutt: Selling on outcomes is something that’s gone across the channel. Does that speak to the solutions focus you’re talking about?

Robert May: When you talk about outcomes, you usually go into business outcomes. Conveying the need for a new tehnology or solution to the management level. So that you’re putting in terms they understand, whether that’s how to make more profit, how to reduce operating costs and so forth. Certainly, it’s a matter of helping to translate from the technical to the non-technical, so to speak.

Robert Dutt: I have to imagine that’s increasingly important because we’re seeing, with all the attention security is getting of late, a lot more attention from folks who aren’t necessarily directly, technically responsible for security, but ultimately, the C-suite who are responsible for the company-wide vision.

Robert May: Certainly. You saw this inflection point during the pandemic, where suddenly there was a lot more attention and visibility at the board level and the C-level on, “What are we doing?”

You saw a ramp-up in the hiring of chief information security officers across all types of industries. This brings a renewed focus from that top level, from people who are traditionally not technical. They want to understand, “What are we doing? How are we taking care of this thing I heard in the news?” And understand what the lower levels are doing about it.

Robert Dutt: As partners are required to look at more areas of expertise, and as you’re expanding the areas you’re serving as the attack surface widens, I’m curious if there are any areas where you see a particular gap.

Are there areas where partners haven’t gone as deep as a whole, and there might be a big opportunity to build expertise to round out that integration story they’re selling?

Robert May: Historically, different partners come from different directions. They might come from the networking side, from the cloud, or from security operations. But these are all converging to a point where you need to at least have some knowledge in those other domains.

If I’m a specialist in SD-WAN, I need to know how that’s going to impact security operations, what type of data they’re going to need to access, and how that feeds into my SIEM and other tools downstream.

The knowledge has been highly concentrated in certain areas, and now they need to have that broader view. This is probably an area to focus on.

Robert Dutt: What do you think are the best approaches for deciding the next area to work on or specialize in? Partners can’t necessarily become experts in everything. How do you make those decisions about where to specialize?

How much should be based on customer feedback versus emerging market opportunities with new customers, versus building on adjacencies to their home base—the technologies with which they’re most familiar and comfortable?

Robert May: In general, it’s going to start from that core knowledge. What’s the current customer base, and what are they telling you they’re missing or the next areas they’re evolving to? That’s a starting point you already have well established, and then it’s expanding out from there.

For example, if it’s a customer focused on SD-WAN, you would want to start expanding into the SOC or into the cloud for areas connected to those SD-WAN deployments. Your customers will be telling you, “This is what we’re doing next,” and you can grow from that perspective.

It covers all the different technologies we provide, of course, but again, it’s more about that starting point for the customer.

Robert Dutt: As partners expand their areas of expertise, do you see a danger or risk in trying to spread technical resources too thinly? What do you see the best-in-class partners doing to mitigate that as they look to expand their portfolio?

Robert May: If you try to go too quickly into areas you’re not familiar with, you end up with shallow knowledge and aren’t able to help the customer at that deep technical level. It’s more of a natural expansion of the products and services they’re offering today, so they have that depth of experience.

The successful ones tend to have more services and other integration with customers. They get a real-time feedback loop established so they know, “This is the next area where I need to invest more skills and knowledge because I’m starting to see this.”

Having that connection with the customer and a service offering is one way to do that.

Robert Dutt: How does expanding the scope of specialization—those technical skills and market skills—help a partner grow, connecting to the business opportunity?

What changes for a partner when they start to develop deeper skills in more areas? How does that translate into differentiation, stronger customer relationships, new revenue opportunities, and those sorts of things?

Robert May: From the point of view of having more things in your portfolio, you can go after new markets. That’s an obvious one.

But if you look at partners that are invested with large enterprise organizations, initially they might be selling to one particular team in that organization. Expanding into other skill sets and areas opens up more projects within that organization as well.

They might be focused initially on the network part, but then they can expand to security operations, operational technology, or whatever other elements that company has.

Robert Dutt: That sounds like you’re seeing partners moving into more sophisticated services over time as a result of building out those capabilities.

Robert May: Certainly. What we’ve seen in the industry is that, to become that trusted advisor, a lot of partners have had to develop managed services as part of their portfolio.

That way, they have that business-to-business connection with the operations team, and they move at the pace the customer is moving. They have that connectivity.

Robert Dutt: For so long in the transition towards managed services, managed security services stayed a pretty—I don’t want to say shallow, but a pretty basic—set of offerings. True managed security services remained a specialist MSSP play.

That’s something I’ve seen changing in the last three or four, maybe five years, towards more managed security among more players. Does that map with what you’re seeing, and how do you see that trend evolving?

Robert May: Definitely. It’s an area where most enterprises have tried to build a lot of this in-house, and then they’ve hit roadblocks where they’re competing for the resources or skills that are out there.

There’s a limited set of skills globally for doing, say, a security operations centre. Being able to outsource that is very attractive for them.

Historically, more than 10 years ago, there were only a few providers providing that. Now you see more and more partners, even smaller ones, providing these types of security operations as a service. It provides economies of scale, leveraging the people underneath to provide that as a service.

Robert Dutt: Is it safe to say that available skill sets are still the biggest limiting reagent in that growth and expansion?

In talking to partners over the years, it’s been a problem. Even talking with yourself and your peers in the vendor space, it’s hard to find and retain the right people with the right skill sets. For partners, especially small partners, that has historically been a massive challenge as well.

Robert May: That’s been a recurring theme for more than 10 years. What we’ve seen from our side as a vendor is that we’ve started providing some of these services to partners. They can leverage us on the back end, provide the connection to the customer, and add value on top of the service.

For example, we provide security operations as a back-end service to the partner, who can resell that and add their own expertise on top. It’s a way to leverage that without rebuilding an entire operation from scratch, which takes a long time. That’s one approach we’ve seen that’s helping.

Of course, there’s all the discussion around AI, but a lot of that is automating pieces that are time-consuming to build and maintain, providing some help there.

Robert Dutt: The nice theory is that, for so long, the mantra of managed services has been, “Automate all the things you can.” Hopefully, that opens up space for your existing people to take on new, more interesting ideas, develop new skill sets, and those sorts of things.

Robert May: Indeed. It’s been the way we’ve grown our own security operations. But once you do that, there’s the next wave of things to follow. It’s a never-ending uphill battle.

Robert Dutt: There’s never a dull moment in the security space, that’s for sure.

Bringing it around to XPERTS Canada, which is taking place in Montreal later this month, it’s a place where you bring together partners to expand their technical skills, understand what’s in the market, what’s coming, and what they need to worry about next for that next round of threats.

For partners who aren’t familiar with the event, can you explain what XPERTS is, who it’s designed for, and what makes it different from other training opportunities you or your peers may offer?

Robert May: Sure. This is something we started more than 10 years ago, and we run it globally and inside each region. This year, the Canadian event is in Montreal in a couple of weeks.

You can think of it as a week-long boot camp. It’s hands-on workshops for technical engineers—a way to get immersed in new technology or things they haven’t seen before.

It’s also run by our consulting systems engineering team. This is the team involved in large-scale projects globally. When there’s a new project for something customized and deeply technical, that information is used to build these workshops.

It’s coming from real-world experience, delivered by strong technical people from the field. It’s something special on top of training.

There’s a requirement in terms of baseline knowledge: you have to be NSE 4 to attend. It’s hands-on workshops, so you have to have that familiarity to follow the workshop.

It gives a week of immersive, hands-on experience across a variety of subjects, from secure networking to security operations, cloud, and operational technology. AI will be sprinkled across everything. It’s embedded inside each of those areas. There’s a lot of new stuff for them to see.

Robert Dutt: You touched on some of the areas of focus. Are there major technical areas that are particularly in focus this year? What should partners expect to take away that they can put to work once they’re back in front of customers the week after?

Robert May: To some extent, it’s getting more hands-on with the security operations portfolio that people may be less familiar with if they’re coming from a networking background. That’s one element.

Certainly, the discussion around AI continues to come up in every conversation. Having practical examples and solutions for customers is something they can take away and say, “Now I understand how I would embed this protection.”

Whether it’s different AI tools customers are using or they’re building their own, how do you secure this infrastructure? It’s bringing it to a practical level so they can have that conversation with the customer as well.

Robert Dutt: I had the chance to attend the Americas International, or CALA, XPERTS a couple of years ago. One thing that struck me was the culture of it, the community feel, because everyone there has that background and those common goals.

Can you touch on the culture or feel you’re looking to encourage with XPERTS?

Robert May: Definitely. These are engineers from different companies. In a way, some are competitors, but it’s more about community learning and the information they share among themselves that doesn’t even come from us.

To sum up the culture, you could look at the Ultimate Fabric Challenge as one example. This is something my team created. It’s a gamification workshop that allows them to compete head-to-head.

A lot of those top engineers get really into it. They’re competing with each other online, flaming each other and things like that. When we have the global championship, people from different countries and regions come together and form their own community.

It’s people learning from each other. That’s something we’ve promoted all these years.

Robert Dutt: Any new wrinkles in the Ultimate Fabric Challenge this year? What are you doing to keep partners on their toes?

Robert May: We’ve put some AI security breach-related things in there. The thing with the Fabric Challenge is that it’s always the latest, greatest version as well.

It might even be pre-release stuff they haven’t played with yet. They have to have that previous knowledge to figure out and solve the problems. There’s a lot of focus on AI this year.

Robert Dutt: Throughout the time I was there, there were a couple of general keynote sessions, but the focus seemed to be so much on the hands-on component: the lab time, the challenge, the time in front of a computer and talking to people.

What’s the importance of those hands-on events as opposed to simply learning about a new technology or product through slideware?

Robert May: At this event, we try to minimize even the amount of plenary sessions and presentations because they’re there to learn and do the hands-on work.

That’s why we keep the event focused on those deeply technical people. It follows that theme all the way through, and that’s what they’re interested in. That’s what we try to emphasize.

Robert Dutt: You described XPERTS as a one-week boot camp, an intensive opportunity for partners to build out their skills. But, to your point about things changing so quickly in the threat landscape partners and customers are facing, training can’t be a once-a-year thing.

How does the event fit into Fortinet’s broader picture of partner education, certification, ongoing technical development, and career and skill building?

Robert May: That’s something we promote and push year-round: maintaining that level of technical skills and specializations across the partner landscape. It’s an ongoing activity partners need to keep up with throughout the year.

XPERTS is a once-a-year special thing. They can see the latest stuff that’s maybe not in the training materials yet, with real-world projects embedded in it. It’s a combination of the two that helps partners move fast.

Robert Dutt: If I’m a partner who’s unable to make it to XPERTS this year, what opportunities are there? You mentioned some of this is pre-release and a preview in many cases. How much can I get access to elsewhere?

Robert May: The XPERTS event is picking up the latest stuff and doing an in-person boot camp. That same content then feeds back into the overall training and certification program.

One part is into the NSE community. That will percolate into the labs and workshops provided through the NSE Institute.

We also have other tools we provide to partners for demos, presales, and other aspects. If they’re at a certain level of certification, they get access to more tools and earlier access to those things.

It’s a continuous, closed loop. This is usually the starting point for the latest stuff, and then it waterfalls down to those other areas.

Robert Dutt: Let’s bring this back to the partner who’s listening. If I’m a Canadian Fortinet partner and want to take a more deliberate approach to developing my team’s expertise over the next year, what are the first two or three things you’d recommend I do, whether that’s a technology area or things to think about in terms of direction or focus?

Robert May: I would look at the current customer base and upcoming projects. Where’s my current focus? Where’s my concentration of skills? What are some additional areas that can build on top of that?

Whether it’s security operations or going deeper into switching and wireless, it depends on the starting point.

That will guide you towards, “These are the areas where I should have more engineers, and I should have more training for them focused on these things.”

Then the partner can start to develop more solutions that are pre-packaged and templated. It’s a way to build out the core knowledge they already have.

Robert Dutt: Do you find it’s usually best to go with something immediately adjacent to what you’re doing, or is it better to create a separate island of expertise or skills and bring the two together over time?

Robert May: It depends on the people more than anything. Personally, I would leverage my current knowledge and build out from there.

But there’s an angle to say, from a top-level business perspective, “I can build out an island of something else, and eventually they join together.”

Both can be successful. It depends on the management objectives.

Robert Dutt: What are you hearing most from customers about where they need help? That may help many partners figure out where to go next.

Robert May: A lot of it is on operations and connecting multiple technologies together. Back to the discussion on platforms and platformization, this is one solution to that problem.

Instead of buying 10 products from 10 vendors, I might want to buy 10 solutions from two vendors. If my team gets trained on one, they probably already know 70 per cent of the second one, 70 per cent of the third one, and so forth. That’s one strategy the customer can employ.

Partners can offer services around a solution or platform. They can start with one part of the project and turn on more capabilities as features, instead of selling a new thing and having separate training and operations around each new technology that gets deployed.

Robert Dutt: Last one for me: as we look ahead to next year and potentially beyond—although you don’t want to get too far out over your skis in this industry with the way things evolve—what will distinguish the partners best positioned to capitalize on the next wave of opportunity?

Is it the ability to communicate and effectively execute on that platformization and integration strategy? What should partners be preparing for today that maybe they’re not thinking about?

Robert May: The last year showed us the rapid transformations from AI itself. Every two months, it’s almost something brand new.

Being flexible, able to change quickly, and adapt to the environment is the most critical thing. You can use AI as a tool to speed up some work, but when the whole landscape is changing, you need to adapt very quickly.

Having a focus across the platform—exposure and visibility into all these different aspects of technology—allows you to adapt and tackle something you’re not doing today, but you have that reach.

Having that platform view gives you more options and keeps that flexibility open.

Robert Dutt: Sage advice. Once again, I’d like to thank you for taking the time.

Robert May: Awesome. Thanks so much.

Robert Dutt: There you have it. Fortinet’s Robert May on the changing technical demands facing cybersecurity partners and the importance of building expertise that goes beyond individual products.

I’d like to thank Robert for joining us, and thank you for listening.

One thing that stood out to me from this conversation is the balance partners need to strike between depth and breadth. Customers increasingly want integrated solutions rather than collections of individual technologies, but that doesn’t mean every partner needs to be an expert in everything.

As Robert suggests, there’s a lot to be said for starting with the customers and capabilities you already know, then building outwards into adjacent areas where you can deliver additional value.

There’s also an interesting opportunity in managed services, particularly as vendors like Fortinet make more sophisticated security operations capabilities available to partners who might not have the resources to build those capabilities entirely on their own.

Of course, developing those skills takes ongoing investment, and that’s where events like XPERTS 26 Canada come into the picture.

The event takes place in Montreal from November 22 to 27, bringing together Fortinet’s technical partner community for hands-on training, workshops, and the Ultimate Fabric Challenge.

You’ll find more information about the event and Fortinet’s partner training resources in the accompanying post at ChannelBuzz.ca.

Hello and welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, November 11, 2026. Today is Remembrance Day. Lest we forget. And here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

And here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

Today, new research finds Canadian organizations are becoming less confident in their ability to manage cyberattacks, even as AI improves threat detection. Netskope names a new global channel chief. And Flashpoint introduces agentic AI to automate threat-intelligence workflows.

First up, Canadian organizations may be getting better at detecting cyber threats, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re getting better at surviving them.

That’s one of the key findings from new Canadian data in Kyndryl’s 2026 Readiness Report.

According to the research, only 20 per cent of Canadian respondents say their organizations are completely ready to manage cyberattacks.

That’s down from 36 per cent in last year’s report.

And the decline comes despite growing confidence in artificial intelligence as a cybersecurity tool.

Seventy-nine per cent of Canadian leaders say AI helps their organizations identify threats faster than traditional approaches, while 78 per cent consider AI essential to effective cybersecurity operations.

But there’s another side to that equation.

Sixty-five per cent say AI is increasing the sophistication and scale of cyber threats, and 52 per cent believe cybersecurity risks are growing faster than their organizations’ ability to address them.

So AI is simultaneously helping security teams identify problems and making the threats they’re dealing with more difficult.

The research also found that 80 per cent of Canadian organizations are deploying AI beyond pilot projects.

But nearly half of respondents say their current AI strategy developed without deliberate planning.

That raises questions about whether organizations are moving quickly enough on governance, resilience and recovery as AI becomes more deeply integrated into their operations.

Kyndryl’s argument is that identifying a cyberattack sooner isn’t the same thing as being prepared to manage it.

Organizations still need to contain an incident, maintain critical operations, and recover when something goes wrong.

And that’s an important distinction for the channel.

For Canadian MSPs and solution providers, the opportunity isn’t limited to selling more detection technology.

It’s also about helping customers understand their risks, establish recovery plans, strengthen operational resilience, and make sure they can keep running when preventive controls aren’t enough.

Next, Netskope has named Carrie Francey its new senior vice president of global channel sales, bringing an experienced channel executive into the cybersecurity company’s worldwide partner organization.

Francey has previously held leadership roles at Microsoft, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, ServiceNow and Zendesk.

She’s also a co-founder of Women in Cloud, an organization focused on supporting women entrepreneurs and technology businesses.

At Netskope, she’ll oversee global channel sales and work with a broad range of partners, including resellers, MSPs, MSSPs, cloud marketplaces and global systems integrators.

The appointment comes as Netskope continues expanding its channel strategy around cloud security and secure AI adoption.

Earlier this year, the company introduced its Catalyst MSP and service provider program, along with Partner Orchestrator, a tool designed to simplify provisioning and management for service providers.

The program also introduced more flexible pricing and go-to-market options intended to make it easier for partners to build managed services around Netskope’s platform.

Francey’s arrival gives Netskope a new leader to build on those investments.

And it’s an interesting time to take over a security channel organization.

As customers adopt more cloud applications and AI tools, their security requirements are changing, and many need help implementing and managing protections across increasingly complex environments.

That creates opportunities for partners beyond the initial technology sale, including consulting, implementation, policy management and ongoing managed security services.

Netskope is positioning its partner ecosystem as central to that strategy, and Francey will be responsible for helping turn those opportunities into sustainable channel businesses.

And finally today, Flashpoint is introducing specialized AI agents to help cybersecurity teams manage the growing workload involved in threat intelligence.

The company has announced Flashpoint Agentic AI, a new offering that embeds automated intelligence workflows directly into its existing platforms.

The centerpiece is Agentic Hub, a new environment within Flashpoint Ignite that combines conversational AI with purpose-built agents.

Rather than simply asking an AI assistant to summarize a report, security analysts can delegate more complex, multistep tasks.

For example, an analyst could ask about an emerging threat, and the system could investigate related vulnerabilities, exposed credentials, fraud activity and threat actors.

Other agents are designed to produce scheduled intelligence briefings, configure monitoring alerts, triage incoming intelligence and help organizations define their priority intelligence requirements.

That’s a formal way of describing the questions an organization needs its threat-intelligence program to answer.

One important element is that Flashpoint says the findings remain linked to the underlying intelligence sources.

That allows analysts to review the evidence and validate what the automated systems have found, rather than simply accepting an AI-generated conclusion.

And there’s a clear operational problem behind the announcement.

Flashpoint cites research finding that 65 per cent of surveyed organizations struggle with alert noise and false positives, while 55 per cent report insufficient analyst capacity.

The company’s approach is to use AI agents to handle recurring work, giving security professionals more time to investigate complex threats and make decisions.

For security providers and organizations operating threat-intelligence teams, it’s another example of AI moving beyond assistance with individual tasks toward automating more complete workflows.

Of course, the effectiveness of those workflows will depend on the quality of the intelligence and how reliably the agents operate.

But the goal is straightforward: help security teams get more useful work done without requiring a proportional increase in staffing.

You’ll find more details on all three stories at ChannelBuzz.ca.

And before we wrap up, a quick note on In The Channel.

Later today on In The Channel, we’ll have my conversation with Fortinet’s Robert May, discussing why cybersecurity partners need to think beyond individual technologies.

We talk about how different security capabilities need to work together, and what that means for partners building more complete solutions for their customers.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s episode featured my conversation with Cisco Canada’s chief technology officer.

We discussed why one of the biggest challenges in cybersecurity isn’t necessarily a shortage of technology, but how effectively organizations are putting the tools they already have to work.

Both episodes are available at ChannelBuzz.ca and wherever you get your podcasts.

That’s The Buzz for Wednesday, November 11.

I’m Robert Dutt. Thanks for listening, and have a great day.

Hello and welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, today is Tuesday, November 10, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

Today, Huntress uncovers new evidence of a much deeper intrusion into compromised backup servers. Canadian security vendor Devolutions is expanding its privileged access management platform. And new GTIA research points to growing cybersecurity opportunities for IT service providers.

First up, Huntress has published new findings from its investigation into attacks against AhsayCBS backup management servers, and the activity appears to have gone considerably further than the cryptocurrency mining initially reported last month.

Back in October, Huntress identified attackers exploiting two vulnerabilities in AhsayCBS, a platform used by MSPs and other service providers to manage customer backup operations.

Those vulnerabilities allowed attackers to bypass authentication and execute commands with system-level privileges on vulnerable servers.

The initial investigation uncovered malicious webshells and cryptocurrency miners.

But Huntress has now examined three compromised servers in one environment, and found a much more extensive collection of malicious tools.

These include five different families of webshells, a second cryptocurrency miner, and a Python-based implant designed to communicate with an external command-and-control server.

One particularly unusual webshell was designed to hide encrypted malicious code inside PNG image files, then extract and execute that code in memory.

That could allow malicious activity to resemble ordinary image traffic, making it harder to identify through conventional monitoring.

Huntress also found tunneling tools, remote access software, and broad exclusions configured in Microsoft Defender.

And perhaps most concerning for service providers, investigators observed activity consistent with an attempt to retrieve stored credentials from a related Veeam backup environment.

Huntress hasn’t established that backup data was stolen, but the findings suggest the attackers may have been interested in more than simply using compromised servers to mine cryptocurrency.

And that’s especially concerning when the compromised systems are responsible for managing backups and potentially have privileged access to other infrastructure.

Ahsay has released hotfixes for the exploited vulnerabilities, and Huntress has verified that the version ten hotfix blocks the entry point it observed.

But the company is emphasizing that applying a patch doesn’t necessarily remove malicious tools that attackers have already installed.

For MSPs running AhsayCBS, the recommendation is to investigate potentially exposed systems for evidence of compromise, not simply assume that installing the update resolves everything.

The broader lesson is that backup infrastructure needs to be protected and monitored as carefully as the production systems it’s intended to recover.

Next, Montreal-based Devolutions is expanding its privileged access management platform to bring more everyday endpoint administration under the same security controls.

The company has announced new device enrollment and centralized software management capabilities, marking the first phase of its endpoint privilege management roadmap.

The idea is to address a familiar challenge for IT teams and MSPs.

Organizations want to eliminate unnecessary local administrator privileges, but employees still need legitimate software installed, updated, and maintained.

And that often creates friction between security requirements and the routine work of keeping systems running.

Devolutions wants to bring those processes together.

The upcoming capabilities will allow administrators to enroll devices from existing management environments, including systems such as Microsoft Intune, and centrally approve and manage software installations.

The software management component uses UniGetUI technology, which brings together multiple software package managers through a common interface.

That means IT teams could manage approved software without having to give users permanent local administrator rights simply to install or update applications.

The new features build on Devolutions’ existing privileged access management capabilities, which include time-limited access approvals, credential management, session recording, and auditing.

The company has also introduced more granular administrator roles, allowing MSPs and internal IT teams to separate responsibilities without giving every administrator access to sensitive credentials.

For MSPs, the broader objective is to make privileged access management practical for smaller IT teams that don’t necessarily have the resources to operate complex enterprise security platforms.

Now, the new endpoint enrollment and centralized software management features aren’t generally available just yet.

Devolutions expects them to become available in December, while its existing PAM platform is available now.

But it’s an interesting expansion of the privileged access management category, bringing the question of who can access systems closer to the question of what they’re allowed to do on those systems.

And finally today, new research from the Global Technology Industry Association suggests cybersecurity remains a significant growth opportunity for IT service providers, with artificial intelligence creating additional demand for new services.

GTIA previewed findings from its latest Channel Trends in Cybersecurity research at its ChannelCon EMEA event in London.

According to the North American findings, 76 per cent of respondents plan to add new cybersecurity solutions over the next twelve months.

That’s up from 65 per cent in last year’s research.

And nearly 60 per cent say they plan to add AI-related cybersecurity solutions.

But the opportunity isn’t limited to selling additional security products.

GTIA identifies areas including AI governance, model and data security, and acceptable-use policies as potential new services for solution providers.

In other words, as customers adopt AI tools, they increasingly need help understanding how to use them safely, protect sensitive information, and establish practical rules around their use.

The research also found that half of respondents reported revenue increases directly related to cybersecurity this year, particularly in identity, security management, cloud, and data solutions.

And in a separate quarterly cybersecurity tracker, GTIA identifies AI-generated attacks as a leading concern among customers, while also highlighting gaps in the deployment of more established security protections.

That creates an interesting combination for MSPs.

Customers are worried about emerging AI threats, but many still need help implementing fundamental security controls.

So the opportunity may involve both new AI-specific services and continued work strengthening the security foundations customers already depend on.

You’ll find more details on all three stories at ChannelBuzz.ca.

And before we go, a quick note on In The Channel.

Later today on In The Channel, we’ll have a conversation with Cisco Canada‘s chief technology officer about the challenges facing cybersecurity, and why the biggest problem may not be a lack of security technology, but how effectively organizations are using what they already have.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s episode featured my conversation with Peter DiMarco and Rob Brown of D&H Canada.

We discussed the distributor‘s strong Canadian growth, its expanding advanced solutions business, and how it’s helping partners pursue bigger opportunities around the products they sell.

Both episodes are available at ChannelBuzz.ca and wherever you get your podcasts.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt. Thanks for listening, and have a great day.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news, information and analysis to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

D&H Canada is having a strong year, with double-digit growth overall and even faster growth in advanced solutions. But as the distributor expands into more sophisticated technologies and works with a broader range of solution providers, it’s also trying to preserve the high-touch approach that has traditionally distinguished it in the SMB channel.

At D&H’s THREAD conference in Toronto, I caught up with Peter DiMarco, general manager of D&H Canada, and Rob Brown, vice president of sales, to talk about how the business has evolved in 2026, what they’re hearing from Canadian partners, and where they see the opportunities ahead.

We discuss the impact of rising technology prices on reseller and customer budgets, how D&H is helping partners move into advanced solutions and AI, and the growing role of its Partnerfi community.

Let’s get right into it, my chat with Peter DiMarco and Rob Brown.

Robert Dutt: Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time.

Peter DiMarco: Pleasure to be here.

Robert Dutt: Pete, when we talked back in February about the investments and ambition for the year, we talked about the idea that the companies willing to invest through uncertain times would come out ahead. We’re getting towards the end of the year. How’s that played out? What’s changed most significantly in the Canadian business since last we spoke, which was much nearer the top of the year than the end?

Peter DiMarco: Yeah, so to answer your first question, it’s played out really well for us. We continue to grow at a double-digit pace. If you look at our advanced solutions space, that’s actually growing 40%, 50%, 60%, depending upon what category. That actually includes cloud as well.

So everything has turned out, honestly, better than expected. We hired a bunch of resources. We had to put them in place and get them trained, and the onboarding and acceleration of those resources have helped fuel our growth for this year. The results honestly came out better than expected.

Robert Dutt: Where are those hires, where are those resources centred right now?

Peter DiMarco: Mostly, 100% in customer-facing and market-facing roles. So support teams, sales teams, team leads, operations managers, pre-sales engineers, and then a couple of field roles as well.

Robert Dutt: All right. Rob, you’re now a year or so into the role of leading sales. I’m curious what you’re hearing from Canadian solution providers. Where are they finding opportunities, and what are they asking D&H to help them do that wasn’t maybe on the radar a year or two ago?

Rob Brown: Sure. Well, the obvious answer is the supply chain challenges we have and some of the price increases that have plagued the entire channel and put pressure on customer budgets. It’s kind of shifted everything. And you’re right, a year ago, we really weren’t having this conversation.

I’d like to say there’s never a good challenge I like to waste, because it’s an excellent time to offer value, right?

So I think our general role in distribution, as a channel community as a whole, is to supply as much transparent information as we possibly can so that customers can make new decisions.

They started their year with a budget. Their budget’s probably not going up, yet the prices went up by 10%, 15%, and sometimes even more than that. You might have a customer that needed 100 laptops, and now he can only afford to buy 80 with his budget. He still needs the other 20. What do you do?

There’s a lot of value distribution and the ecosystem can supply in that type of environment to offset some of these challenges, add value, and give customers good answers from which to make solid business decisions.

So I would say, in general, to answer your question, it’s the price changes. It’s dominating the conversation.

They need technology. The legacy technology they have is not the technology they need to move forward. They need to be able to invest in some of these emerging, largely AI-based technologies, but there are budget constraints around pricing.

Robert Dutt: How’s that conversation evolved over the course of the year? We had the initial RAMageddon shock. I’m just curious how you’ve seen resellers react to that and how the conversation has evolved.

Rob Brown: It went from shock and awe to, “I’ve got to manage this process. I have no choice.”

It’s funny how quickly you can adapt. The smart ones are adding value and telling customers, “The best price I can guarantee you is today, because I don’t know what tomorrow’s going to look like. I don’t know what supply’s going to look like tomorrow.”

We’re likely going to be here for a while. I don’t think this is going to resolve itself by the new year.

So you need to think about this thing long term. You need to talk to your finance teams about your budget long term, and you need to work with partners like D&H to help you overcome some of these challenges.

We have a reserve warehouse. We’re more than happy and willing to put your inventory in it. We can buy and hold it at a current price and hold it for later, and we’ll project-roll that out for you.

And one thing I can guarantee you is the price that we charge to buy and hold your product is a lot smaller than the price increase you’re about to incur.

So there are answers out there. You just have to explore.

And I think that once the resellers and the solution providers themselves realized the situation they were in, and once the shock wore off, it was into solution mode.

Robert Dutt: You must have seen a lot of pickup on that offer, especially in the part of the year where quote validity was shrinking to hours, sometimes it felt like.

Rob Brown: Yeah. Our reserve warehouse, if you walked through there, it’s a nice big warehouse, lots of space for us to grow. And our reserve inventory shelves were largely empty prior to this challenge. Now they’re stocked full.

Robert Dutt: Peter, you touched on some of the growth areas a bit earlier, but can you elaborate a bit on where the growth is coming from today? Is it primarily more business with existing partners, bringing new partners into the fold, expanding the technology categories? Where’s the growth?

Peter DiMarco: Great question, and it’s something that we look at often.

I’d say it’s all of the above. Many new partner relationships. If I have to look at where we are more successful, or where we have faster success than I expected, it’s partner acquisition.

So, for example, in the advanced solutions space, this year we’ve done business with 262 new advanced solutions partners. They hadn’t bought those products from us in the past. Now they’re buying products from us.

And a lot of it is around ease of doing business, around response time, being able to help them put together bills of materials. To Rob’s point, a ton of transparency around not only price increases, but also helping them around things like product roadmaps, features and benefits, and what the options are around certain price points along the way.

We’ve also done some creative financing, offered extended terms to partners as well to help extend out their business, knowing that budgets have gone up.

Now, within that, when I look at the overall segment, the majority of the growth has come from the higher end of the SMB and the mid-market partners.

So existing partners continue to invest in their sales force, and as they bring on new customers or new end customers, they’re coming to us for product, for training, for events and boot camps. And so that’s really helped as well.

Robert Dutt: You mentioned advanced solutions, and I know that’s been a huge focus area for the last little while. The history of D&H is kind of focused on that smaller VAR, the SMB-focused partner. How do you pursue those opportunities without losing the high-touch accessibility that made D&H so successful with smaller partners in the first place?

Peter DiMarco: Yeah, it’s a great question. So the investments we made in sales resources have allowed us to do that. Our customer bases are smaller versus where they’ve been in the past, so our sales reps have more time to spend with partners.

The second lever that we pulled is doing even more segmentation in our sales force for partners that focus on mid-market and the higher end of the SMB, separating those from those that focus on the S in the SMB.

And the good news for that is every single customer gets a personal sales rep. So just because you’re smaller doesn’t mean you’re going to see a degradation in service. If anything, you’ll see even better service, because smaller partners tend to have the same issues.

And you can aggregate them together and come up with a solution to help not just one, but many partners. For example, things like extended financing programs that we think would be really good for many SMB partners.

So a lot of focus on segmentation, as well as we’ve added some layers to our sales organization, team leads and other roles that give us greater eyes on how we’re supporting those customers every day.

Robert Dutt: Within the sales organization, it sounds like there are sort of separate teams serving the two sides of the house there. How do you think about the opportunity to bring along folks who have been historic D&H partners but are looking upmarket or seeing more opportunities around more sophisticated solutions, that sort of thing?

Peter DiMarco: We absolutely love it. And when we look back on what are the things we’re most proud of, it’s helping partners move upmarket.

And so by having lots of focus on customers, spending a ton of time with them — you’ve probably heard our Show Up Big initiative, spending a lot more time with partners — we’re really able to dive in with those partners that want to grow.

And while every partner will say that they want to grow, us doing the scanning of the partner base, spending a lot of time with them, we’re able to find out those partners that are committed.

And committed to us, number one, is the owner committed to investing in advanced technologies?

Number two, do they have sales resources and the sales motions to sell into these technologies or acquire new customers?

And then number three, do they have the pre-sales and post-sales engineering bench to be able to execute?

And so we do a lot of work through our field team, our inside team, our business units, to look at a thousand partners as an example, and then come away with, “Boy, here are the 150 that we think really get it. We have their commitment.”

Rob Brown: Yeah, I would layer on that by saying not every SMB reseller has the AI skill set on their bench. They just don’t. I mean, they’re a smaller organization.

When you talk about the larger enterprise partners across the country, they have the investment capability to hire talent, or they already have talent on their bench, and they can have those people build their AI practices on their behalf.

But in that smaller community, they just don’t have it. That doesn’t mean the answers are not there for them.

We’ve created a program called Go Big AI at D&H, and it’s designed to do just that: enable partners who don’t have the AI skill set on their bench, provide them with vendor training, provide them with sales training, provide them with technology training.

That’s just what we have in-house. And we also partner with various vendors, all the players in the AI space. They also have their own unique training, their own play cards and their own go-to-market strategies around AI that we can filter through this program and disseminate to the SMB community.

So just because you’re an SMB customer doesn’t mean you’re not going to use AI. It’s not exclusive to the enterprise-class reseller or customer. AI is pervasive. It’s going to explode across all segments of the country and customers that use it.

So SMB is a big opportunity for us. We grew up in that space, and we’re taking the skills and what we know how to do best, taking a hands-on approach to dealing with some of those smaller partners that just don’t have the skill set themselves.

Robert Dutt: We’re here at THREAD, and I’ve had the opportunity, the fortune, of being at this event a few times over the years, back since well before it was known as THREAD.

What’s the big message you’re bringing to Canadian partners this year? What should they be paying attention to, whether it’s a technology opportunity, a change in the market, something new from you guys that you’re focused on here today?

Rob Brown: This might be a unique perspective, and it might even surprise a few people, but as the world shifts to AI, digital automation is really controlling a lot of your go-to-market strategy. It really controls your sales strategy, how you deal with customers, how you engage with customers.

And we have our own digital automation journey that we’re on. We believe in the full utilization of our data and as much automation as we can possibly bring to market.

But we strongly believe that platforms transact and people sell. We invest heavily in our people. We’re a people-first organization. Platforms should augment the selling experience, not replace it.

So as an industry pivots towards digital automation and utilizing AI to drive workloads and policy and process, we’re on that path as well.

Having said that, we’re also doubling down on the human approach to selling AI, and I think that’s a unique differentiator for D&H.

Robert Dutt: Has THREAD itself evolved as the D&H business has changed?

I can remember in the early days, the message from Greg Tobin, who was leading the business at the time, was that this is an old-fashioned selling show. And I think it’s gotten a little bit added onto that, if anything.

How are you thinking about THREAD today, especially as you’ve built the business out and added new things?

Peter DiMarco: Yeah, so as a former sales guy, I’d always love to sell more, but I would tell you the event has really transformed from a selling show to enablement, education and opportunity management.

So our partners are here today to do a couple of things.

Number one, get educated and potentially enabled on solution sets.

Number two, advance their overall business by meeting with D&H experts, be it credit, be it marketing, be it our sales team, to help them drive their business to greater levels.

And the third thing is to meet with other partners.

So through our Partnerfi community, we’ve expanded it from nine members to 50 members over the last year. Many of those Partnerfi members will be here today.

And they love the fact that they can engage at events like this and just talk shop, whether it’s solutions around AI or how do I compensate my engineers? How do I fill my bench with capacity?

So the event itself has transformed, to your point, from a show to a conference or a summit that’s all about relationships, education and enablement.

Robert Dutt: Refresh my memory. How long has Partnerfi been active in the Canadian market?

Peter DiMarco: It has been active for four years.

Robert Dutt: How have you seen that community evolve, both in terms of scale and the role it plays in the overall Canadian business?

Peter DiMarco: Yeah, so I’ll go first, and I’m sure Rob’s got a lot of great input on Partnerfi, as he’s been a key leader in expanding it.

So when we initially started out, it was initially just that, just starting out. Let’s get partners on board that like us, number one.

And number two, we did a very good job of picking partners that wanted to go on this evolution and help build the next wave of Partnerfi with us. So that was considered wave one.

The next wave was working with our board and identifying partners in each province to determine who are the target partners that are growing in their market, that have really great skills, that would be willing to share and interact and network, which is the most important thing as it relates to a community.

And then they’re willing to make the time to do that.

So through a dedicated recruiting effort, we went on a mission over the last 12 months to come up with a great set of partners. And that’s how we got from nine to 50.

Rob Brown: I would add on that we’re not just out there recruiting any partner into the community. We think there’s a formula there.

There needs to be balance, geographic balance, representation from Atlantic Canada, Quebec, Ontario, Central Region, West, solution providers, resellers, cloud practice partners, CSP partners and things like that.

So a diverse mix of customers is really, really important to us.

And we grew, in my tenure here a year later, we’re four times the size of the community. We have aspirations to grow from where we’re at today by adding another 20 by our next summit in the spring.

And what I hear from partners is that because we’ve only been four years old, we’re an emerging community and we’re building out our practice, we’re really hyper-focused on the peer-to-peer side of the business, really diving into the collaboration.

Some of the other communities in the marketplace are a little bit more mature, have a couple hundred partners in their community, and ours retains its intimacy, strong connections with each other, strong learnings from each other.

And we’re going to work hard over the years to hold on to that part of the community.

The most value we get, I believe our vendors get, and I can tell you for sure our resellers get from the community, is their ability to sit down with each other, express common challenges, learn from each other, express common opportunities.

“I don’t know how to do that. How did you do it?”

“Okay, that’s helpful for me. Thank you.”

Communities were built on that spirit. And if we let it go, the whole thing kind of dies and fizzles off with it.

So in Partnerfi, we’re going to double down on that peer-to-peer connection, and we’re going to make sure our program doesn’t grow so big to the point where it becomes a little bit more cold and vendor-driven.

It’s supposed to be a peer-to-peer community, and we’re going to hold onto that.

Robert Dutt: You touched a little bit earlier on the way AI is, or the way you’re thinking about AI in terms of the sales effort and that sort of thing.

I’m curious how you guys are thinking about AI internally at D&H in terms of how you’re using it, how you see it changing the partner experience with D&H over time.

Rob Brown: Yeah, so I mean, I’m a salesperson. I’m the sales guy, right? So I look at everything from a sales lens.

This is a tremendous opportunity for technology refresh.

If you look at the installed base that most of our vendors have sold through, that technology cannot handle the AI workloads of the future. It just can’t.

You’re driving a Honda Civic around a Formula One track. It just doesn’t work. You need to upgrade the car, which means that’s a tremendous opportunity for us to go after.

And our role is to help our vendor partners dive into that installed base and help the resellers that service those customers refresh that technology.

Anything that is a generation too old, that’s off warranty, and that customer is on an AI journey, it’s our job to help enable the technology refresh inside of that organization.

So that’s what I see. I see dollar signs when I look at that.

It’s a tremendous opportunity because what I don’t know, I’d love to ask somebody the statistic, but I would imagine the stat would come back: what percentage of customers actually have the technology to support the AI workloads that they’re building?

I would imagine 90%-plus can say, “I don’t have that.”

So it is an absolute tremendous opportunity.

We play a role in the ecosystem to educate many of these SMB partners on how to do that through the vendors that we serve. And that’s one of the roles that we have at D&H.

And like I said before, we created a program called Go Big AI to serve just that purpose.

Robert Dutt: And Peter, maybe the same question, but from a more operational viewpoint internally at D&H, in terms of how you operate the business, how you interface with partners going forward. How do you see AI shaping that?

Peter DiMarco: Yeah, so we’re just beginning on the journey right now.

As Rob mentioned, we’re going through a digital transformation initiative here at D&H, which has been a few years in the making. So I think that’s helped.

If I look at every core department that supports our customers today, AI is embedded in how we support those customers today.

Whether it’s transactionally and making faster decisions, whether it’s in areas like customer support, whether it’s our market-facing resources leveraging Copilot, we’re leveraging it across our warehouse to be more supply chain-efficient.

We’re using AI to some extent to provide a better customer experience. And that’s evolving.

As I sit here today and I look to the future, I think six months from now we’ll have additional ways of using AI, and then 18 months from now. It’s very much a journey.

And for us, what we hear is the best organizations today as it relates to AI are certainly on a journey, taking all the departments through this, versus kind of a big-bang approach.

For us, it’s absolutely not a big-bang approach.

Robert Dutt: Sort of building on that from both of you, looking ahead into 2027, what should partners expect to see next from your organization? And maybe more importantly than that, what would you like them to be doing a little bit differently with D&H a year from now?

Peter DiMarco: So a year from now, we would love for them to come to us ahead of time with their business plans or visions as to where and how they want to grow their business, sharing these plans with us and allowing us to participate where we can to help them support their business.

If they don’t necessarily have a planning process like a multibillion-dollar company, we’d love to help them do that, because we do that well as a company. We’ve got plans and KPIs. We’ve got a pretty rigorous process that we use.

We would love to teach them and coach them on how to do that.

But initially, we’d like a seat at the table to help them grow. That’d be number one.

Number two, don’t feel like you have to do it all yourself. Leverage our pre-sales resources, our deployment resources out in the field, our product specialists to help get to the best price, best specification.

Use more of us so that you can free up your cycles to focus on your customers.

Rob Brown: One piece of advice I’d give the community: if they can afford it, if it’s in their budgets, invest in AI talent.

You need to put the skills on your bench to be able to build out your practice and provide that value to your customer base.

But in those places, to Peter’s point, with those solution providers that don’t have the capacity to go out and invest heavily in AI talent, and I think we all understand AI talent is not cheap. It’s an expensive resource.

Robert Dutt: Neither cheap nor readily accessible.

Rob Brown: Both, all of the above, which is why they’re in high demand.

And that’s probably why there’s a lot of 20-year-olds out there with six-figure salaries right now, because it is a unique skill set.

If you’re one of those partners who do not have that talent on your bench, and if you’re not in a position to invest in it, that’s where we can come in.

We can combine the best efforts of D&H and the vendors that we serve and bring the AI practices and play cards that we’ve developed to those partners and through those partners.

So that would be number one.

Number two, I’m a big advocate of utilizing data. AI is just utilizing data for an outcome, when you think about it. And I think our community can learn that same lesson.

The resellers that we serve have a tremendous amount of data on their customers. The vendors have a tremendous amount of data on their customers and the technologies that serve them. And we know which solution providers sell those types of solutions to customers.

What we don’t do well, in my opinion, is combine all that data into one go-to-market strategy.

So we’re working heavily on that today, and I think you’ll find D&H will take a very data-driven, targeted approach to targeting technologies to solution providers that have the skill set, towards customers that have the need.

Robert Dutt: All right. It’s always interesting times, I think, in distribution. And thanks for taking the time to walk me through where you guys are seeing the business and where it’s heading.

Peter DiMarco: My pleasure. Thank you.

Rob Brown: Appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Robert Dutt: There you have it, Peter DiMarco and Rob Brown of D&H Canada on the distributor’s growth, the challenges facing Canadian solution providers and the opportunities ahead.

I’d like to thank Peter and Rob for joining us, and thank you for listening.

One of the interesting threads, pardon the pun, running through that conversation is how D&H is trying to balance two priorities: expanding into more sophisticated technology opportunities while continuing to offer smaller resellers the kind of personal attention and support that can help them grow their businesses.

As Rob pointed out, even challenges like rising prices and uncertain supply can create opportunities for partners that are prepared to help customers find a way forward.

If you’re enjoying the podcast, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and please consider leaving a rating or review.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Hello and welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, and today is Monday, November 9, 2026. Here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

Today, Auvik introduces new tools to automate network operations and identify vulnerable devices. Kyndryl and AWS are putting agentic AI to work on enterprise modernization. And Fortinet and Equinix are bringing new security controls to distributed AI environments.

Let’s get into it.

First up, Waterloo, Ontario-based Auvik is taking another step toward automated network management, with two new capabilities designed to reduce the amount of repetitive work performed by IT teams and managed service providers.

The company has made its Automation Framework and CVE Monitoring Agent generally available, building on the AI-powered network management capabilities it introduced earlier this year.

Let’s start with the Automation Framework.

It allows technicians to create and execute jobs across groups of network devices, rather than making the same changes individually on every switch, router, or other piece of network equipment.

An administrator can define the commands to be executed, select the devices involved, and run the job immediately or schedule it for later.

For an MSP managing networks across multiple customers, that’s potentially a meaningful reduction in routine manual work, while also helping make configuration changes more consistent.

The second new capability is the CVE Monitoring Agent.

It automatically checks published vulnerability information against devices in a customer’s network, using sources including the National Vulnerability Database and vendor security advisories.

That’s a task that can require a lot of manual effort, particularly when an MSP is managing devices from multiple manufacturers across dozens or hundreds of customer environments.

The agent is intended to help technicians identify which devices may be exposed to newly published vulnerabilities and prioritize what needs attention.

Both capabilities became generally available November first.

And the broader story here is Auvik’s movement toward what it describes as autonomous IT.

Earlier this year, the company introduced AI agents that help technicians investigate network problems, interpret alerts, and determine what to do next.

Now it’s adding more tools to help carry out network operations, while keeping technicians in control of the process.

For MSPs, that distinction matters.

Better visibility and faster troubleshooting are useful, but reducing the manual work involved in managing customer networks could have a more direct effect on service delivery costs and technician capacity.

Next, Kyndryl is expanding its collaboration with Amazon Web Services to help organizations modernize applications and infrastructure using agentic AI.

The companies have announced an integrated solution combining Kyndryl’s Agentic Modernization offering with AWS Transform.

The idea is to use AI-powered workflows, automation, and engineering expertise to help organizations assess their existing technology, plan modernization projects, and carry out the work more consistently.

And that’s a significant challenge for many enterprises.

Legacy applications and infrastructure can be expensive to maintain, difficult to change, and a major obstacle to adopting new technologies.

Kyndryl is positioning the new solution as a way to make modernization a more continuous process, rather than a series of large, isolated projects.

One of the interesting elements is what Kyndryl calls services-as-software.

Essentially, the company is using software-driven automation and reusable AI workflows to perform parts of the work that traditionally required substantial consulting and engineering effort.

That doesn’t eliminate the need for specialized expertise, but it could change how that expertise is applied and how modernization projects are delivered.

The announcement builds on an existing relationship between Kyndryl and AWS, including an expanded strategic collaboration announced earlier this year.

And it points to an interesting development for the services business.

AI isn’t just creating new technologies for solution providers to sell, implement, and manage.

It’s also beginning to change how providers deliver some of their existing services, particularly complex work like application modernization, cloud migration, and infrastructure transformation.

Whether those approaches deliver the efficiency gains vendors are promising will depend on how they perform in real customer environments.

But the direction is certainly worth watching.

And finally today, Fortinet and Equinix are working together to help enterprises secure AI environments that increasingly span multiple clouds, data centres, and other infrastructure.

Fortinet has announced the availability of FortiAIGate within the Equinix Distributed AI Hub, through a new validated reference architecture.

And the challenge they’re addressing is becoming more complicated as organizations move beyond isolated AI experiments.

An enterprise AI application might involve a model running in one environment, business data stored somewhere else, and agents interacting with multiple systems across different clouds or data centres.

That creates security and governance questions that go beyond traditional network protection.

FortiAIGate is designed to inspect AI prompts and responses, enforce security policies for approved AI traffic, and provide visibility into how models and agents are being used.

It also includes controls for monitoring AI consumption costs, including token usage, spending limits, and alerts.

And the architecture is designed to support data residency and sovereignty requirements by keeping security inspection and control within customer infrastructure.

Fortinet also highlights GPU acceleration as a way to maintain performance as AI security inspection scales.

Now, this isn’t an entirely new Fortinet product, and Fortinet and Equinix already have an established relationship.

The announcement is about validating how FortiAIGate can operate within Equinix’s distributed AI infrastructure.

But for partners involved in enterprise AI projects, it illustrates an emerging opportunity.

Securing AI isn’t just about protecting the servers, networks, and cloud environments where it runs.

It’s increasingly about governing the interactions between models, applications, agents, and the data they use.

And as enterprise AI deployments become more distributed, those security requirements are likely to become an increasingly important part of the overall solution.

You’ll find more details on all three stories at ChannelBuzz.ca.

And before we wrap up, a quick note on In The Channel.

Later today on In The Channel, we’ll have my conversation with Peter DiMarco, general manager of D&H Canada, and Rob Brown, the distributor’s vice president of sales.

Recorded at D&H THREAD in the Toronto area last week, we discussed the company’s strong growth in Canada, the increasing importance of advanced solutions to its business, and how D&H is investing to help partners pursue broader opportunities.

That’s coming up later today at ChannelBuzz.ca, and wherever you get your podcasts.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today.

I’m Robert Dutt. Thanks for listening, and have a great day.

Hello and welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, and today is Friday, November 6, 2026.

Today, D&H Canada is reporting strong growth and looking to expand the opportunities available to its partners. The federal budget puts new emphasis on helping Canadian companies commercialize their innovations and attract investment. And Huntress rolls out a broad set of new capabilities across its security platform.

Let’s get into it.

First up, D&H Canada says its business has grown 47 per cent over the past two years, and the distributor sees a significant opportunity to help partners build more complete solutions around the products they sell.

At the company’s THREAD Technology Roadshow in the Toronto area yesterday, D&H Canada general manager Peter DiMarco highlighted strong performance across a number of its business segments.

Its advanced solutions business is up 49 per cent in revenue year to date, including 150 per cent growth in servers and storage, and 86 per cent in networking.

The distributor also reported adding 262 advanced solutions customers. And perhaps the most interesting number is how much its business mix has changed: advanced solutions now account for 28 per cent of D&H’s business, compared with just five per cent back in 2019.

DiMarco also said D&H’s PartnerFi community has expanded from nine members to 50, and outlined continued investments in partner engagement, technical resources, and its Canadian configuration operations.

But the bigger story was where D&H thinks the channel opportunity is heading.

Colin Blair, D&H’s vice president of cybersecurity and emerging technologies, argued that AI is changing several technology markets simultaneously, bringing compute, data, networking, security, and infrastructure decisions much closer together.

His argument is that when a partner sells a server or another piece of hardware, the opportunity increasingly extends into the services, security, data management, networking, and other capabilities needed to make that technology useful.

As Blair put it, the product remains essential, but the opportunity forming around it gets larger.

To help partners pursue that opportunity, D&H is developing practices around areas including VMware alternatives, power and cooling, data resilience, and AI practice-building.

And Blair cautioned partners against trying to become experts in everything themselves. Instead, he encouraged them to lean on distributors, vendors, and other partners for capabilities outside their existing expertise.

There was also a practical warning from a vendor panel featuring HP Canada, Dell Canada, and Lenovo Canada.

HP Canada’s April Marshall said partners should prepare for continued pricing volatility through 2027 and potentially beyond, and stressed the importance of flexibility in longer-term customer agreements.

So there’s a bit of a balancing act here: D&H sees growing opportunities to deliver more sophisticated solutions, even as partners face pricing pressure, skills shortages, and customers who are still figuring out their AI strategies.

We’ll have more from THREAD in upcoming episodes of In The Channel, including conversations recorded with D&H executives yesterday.

Next, the federal government is putting new incentives for investment and commercialization at the centre of its economic agenda.

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne presented Budget 2026 yesterday, with several measures aimed at helping Canadian businesses turn research into commercial products, attract investment, and grow.

One of the headline proposals is a 930-million-dollar expansion of the Scientific Research and Experimental Development tax incentive program.

Commonly known as SR and ED, the program has traditionally supported eligible research and experimental development activities.

The budget proposes extending support to certain commercialization expenses, including costs associated with regulatory approvals, certifications, and protecting intellectual property.

That’s potentially significant for Canadian technology companies, because developing a promising technology is only part of the challenge. Turning that technology into a product, getting it into the market, and building a sustainable business around it can be just as difficult.

The government also introduced what it calls the Canada Growth Incentive, which includes a proposed tax exemption on up to 15 million dollars in eligible capital gains from investments in qualifying Canadian companies.

There’s also an enhanced small-business investment rollover intended to encourage entrepreneurs and investors to reinvest in Canadian businesses.

In other words, Ottawa is trying to improve the economics of building and financing growing companies in Canada.

And there’s a more direct IT angle.

The budget proposes approximately one billion dollars over five years for a Government Transformation Fund, designed to accelerate federal IT modernization projects and improve public services.

That work is tied to Digital Transformation Canada, the government’s initiative to bring together digital expertise and expand the use of AI and other emerging technologies across federal departments.

It’s too early to say how much of that spending will become opportunities for outside solution providers, but it’s certainly a development worth watching for companies serving the public sector.

And while the budget also discusses Canada’s broader AI strategy and incentives for business technology purchases, some of those measures were announced previously.

The key new developments here are the additional commercialization support, the investment incentives, and the proposed federal IT modernization funding.

For the Canadian technology sector, the central question will be whether those measures help more companies move beyond developing innovative technology to building successful businesses around it.

And finally today, Huntress has announced a series of new capabilities across its Agentic Security Platform, designed to turn intelligence gathered from real-world attacks into broader protections for customers and MSPs.

The company says its platform now provides visibility across nearly 300 thousand businesses, 17 million identities, and six million endpoints.

And Huntress wants to use that scale to its advantage.

The underlying idea is that when its security operations centre identifies a new attacker technique or piece of malicious infrastructure targeting one customer, those findings can be used to strengthen protection for other customers before they’re attacked.

One example is a new capability called Adversary Infrastructure, part of Huntress Managed Identity Threat Detection and Response.

When Huntress confirms infrastructure being used in identity attacks, it can turn that intelligence into blocking policies across eligible Microsoft 365 customer environments that have opted in.

Other new identity security capabilities include detection and automatic shutdown of malicious service principals, as well as Lookback, which examines up to 180 days of Microsoft 365 sign-in history when a new customer comes on board.

That means Huntress can potentially uncover evidence of an existing compromise rather than only begin monitoring for new threats from the day the service is deployed.

Huntress is also expanding its managed SIEM and endpoint security capabilities.

Brute Force Sentry, scheduled for general availability November 18, is designed to identify brute-force activity across systems including Windows Remote Desktop and Linux SSH.

And a remote ransomware disruption capability, scheduled for general availability November 30, is intended to stop attacks that originate from unprotected systems and attempt to spread across a network.

There are also updates to security awareness training, including short, contextual exercises that can be triggered by actual security incidents.

The broader direction is toward taking what Huntress learns from defending individual organizations and putting that intelligence to work across its entire customer base.

For MSPs, the appeal is straightforward: faster detection, more automated protection, and less need to manually respond to every emerging threat across every customer environment.

Of course, the new capabilities have different availability dates, and the effectiveness of the broader approach will ultimately depend on how well those automated protections perform in practice.

But it represents a meaningful expansion of Huntress’s managed security offering.

You’ll find more details on all three stories at ChannelBuzz.ca.

And before we wrap up, a quick note on In The Channel.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s episode featured my conversation with Christian Goffi, Nutanix’s channel chief for the Americas, on changes to its Elevate partner program.

We talked about how Nutanix is evolving its approach to partners, and why the company wants them to build more profitable businesses beyond the initial infrastructure sale.

That episode is available now at ChannelBuzz.ca, and wherever you get your podcasts.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines.

I’m Robert Dutt. Thanks for listening, and have a great weekend.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

Nutanix is rolling out significant changes to its Elevate Partner Program this morning, describing them as the largest investment in the program to date. And while there’s a range of new and expanded incentives involved, the bigger story may be what those incentives tell us about how Nutanix sees the channel evolving.

The company is putting more emphasis on what happens after the initial infrastructure sale, rewarding partners for expanding their relationships with customers, driving adoption and renewals, and building services businesses around the platform. It’s also formally bringing systems integrators and consulting partners into Elevate, reflecting the increasingly complex ecosystems involved in delivering modern infrastructure solutions.

But what does all of that mean for partners in practical terms? Where are the new opportunities to make money? What kind of investments will partners need to make to take advantage of them? And how does this fit into a market that’s being reshaped by virtualization disruption, hybrid cloud, and AI?

To explore those questions, I sat down ahead of today’s announcement with Christian Goffi, Nutanix’s channel chief for the Americas. We discussed the economics of the new program, the growing importance of services, the changing role of partners, and what it all means for the Canadian channel.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Christian Goffi.

Robert Dutt: Christian, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it, especially leading up to the launch.

Christian Goffi: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Robert Dutt: You guys are describing these changes as the largest investment in the partner program to date for Nutanix. So give us the big picture here. What’s changing? Why now? And what are you hoping to accomplish with this new version of Elevate?

Christian Goffi: Great question. There’s a lot of things that go into this, as you know, Robert. We want to skate to where the puck is going, right? The old Gretzky quote really tells the story of what these tweaks to Elevate are all about.

There are some foundational things we’d like to see in the evolution of our partner ecosystem. A big one is that we’ve done a really, really good job in our history of going after new customers together.

Nutanix hasn’t been around that long as a brand when you think in a historical sense. We made our name in the hyperconvergence world, which was an appliance at the time. We’ve traversed through multicloud and hybrid multicloud evolution. Now we’re landing in this place of being a platform company for AI workloads.

When you look at the things you need from a channel ecosystem at each phase of our evolution, those things are changing. AI has really rocked us in a good way. It’s forced us to evolve faster than we were used to evolving.

So we’re trying to paint a picture of what we need our partner ecosystem to look like, not for the distant future, but for the near future, answering the questions that customers have.

We’ve always been a brand that has prided itself on customer choice. We’re a very nimble platform that gives you that cloud agility in the private data centre, and that got us started.

Where we are now, we’ve really opened the doors toward collaborating with other brands like we’ve never done before. You see this value proposition of Nutanix showing up with Cisco, NetApp, Everpure, AWS, and Dell.

What is that? We have a common, mutual partner base. Our partners are their partners and vice versa. When we’re landing on these partners, they know them and they know us, but do they know us together? Do they know how to articulate our value proposition together?

That’s one big factor: understanding how to put us together and doing a little less selling of point solutions and a little more selling of joint solutions.

To do that, I think the services layer takes a much bigger role. The competencies we need in our partner community need to evolve as well.

We probably saw a big leap when we introduced products like NDB for database management. We saw that when we introduced NKP for the Kubernetes platform. It’s different to live in a hypervisor world than to go into Kubernetes, and you’ve got to speak all these languages if you want to speak AI.

Our program has a lot to do with guiding partners toward where this is going. It’s not just about the core offering Nutanix has. We’re incentivizing more lifecycle management and cross-selling of the portfolio. Those are two big things.

It’s not so much about landing accounts together and then focusing on getting another one. Now it’s much more about how we’re managing that customer journey after we’ve landed.

What are we doing to ensure customer satisfaction? You can’t have that without proper adoption. You can’t have that without proper implementation. And you can’t have that without your skills and competencies getting higher.

Put all these things together, and we’re seeing additional incentives around cross-selling the portfolio.

We’ve historically had incentives for landing a new account. Now we’re saying that once you’re already in, we’re going to treat it almost like a new landing when it’s a Kubernetes platform or an AI platform. We’re going to incentivize our portfolio products in a significant way.

On the services side, we want to help partners lead with their own services. We’re not a company that’s in the services business. We want our partners to lead with their services.

But we’ve got to do our part, which is the enablement part. Services badging: what can we do so customers can see that reseller as bona fide and certified by the vendor to do those complex deals?

There’s a lot of focus on that, too. Cross-selling, services, lifecycle management — these are all elements of the new Elevate that we’re super excited about.

Robert Dutt: The whole customer lifecycle thing is obviously a huge part of this. It seems like a big focus is moving beyond rewarding the initial transaction to rewarding partners throughout the customer lifecycle.

First of all, how much of that is genuinely new opportunity versus formalizing or expanding incentives and practices that were already there? And how does this change the economics of being a Nutanix partner?

Christian Goffi: Great question. Going back to your comment on lifecycle management, it’s funny because we’ve been talking about that for over a decade as an industry: how can you incentivize the good old infinity loop of customer management?

It’s been really difficult to put together. I can speak from being at different vendors throughout the years. We’ve all strived to do this, so we’re happy to be able to make something like this tangible.

When you ask how that changes the profitability formula, we’ve always been known for doing pretty well in the profitability column.

We’re very clear about who we are and what role partners play for Nutanix. We’re partner-first and partner-only. That’s not changing.

If you want partners to really believe in you, you’ve got to have a product that customers need and want. That’s number one. Number two, you’ve got to have a very profitable proposition, and we’ve been that for them for many years. Number three, you’ve got to showcase your long-term commitment to them. And number four, you’ve got to have a trustworthy relationship at a local level.

Those are the four principles that guide our decision-making when we look at the partner program.

Originally, you mentioned the largest investment we’ve ever made as a company. That’s more of a general view of the total investment into the channel. We’re at a place where we’re investing more now than we ever have, and we’re very proud of that.

As that bucket grows, our ability to grow different pieces of the partner program grows.

For example, cross-selling the portfolio: these are new incentives that we didn’t have before.

We’re also introducing earned BDF, which is kind of like a 1% cash-back model for our Premier-level partners. It gives them a predictable way of knowing what they’re going to get every month.

Our partners have asked for that for years. They love our back-end rebates, but they’re not easy to calculate because you’ve got to outperform by a certain percentage, and if you do, you make a certain amount. It’s hard to plan when you’ve got to wait for that cheque to clear to see how much it actually was.

Introducing the 1% earned BDF is a very nice, predictable engine. Partners can understand that it’s 1% of their total contract value in software sales, and they can use it for planning.

The cool part is that the 1% earned BDF wasn’t something we moved from one pocket into another. We didn’t shift it from other areas of Elevate. We put it on top of what we already had.

The increase in investment in the channel is tangible and real. These are pieces we’re putting on top of what we consider to already be a highly profitable model.

Robert Dutt: So if I’m an existing partner who’s doing pretty much the same business next year, what should I expect in terms of profitability if I keep my model the same as it’s always been, versus optimizing for what you guys are talking about and incentivizing?

Christian Goffi: I think if you evolve with the times — there are some new needs we’re asking for — you’re going to make more money. That’s the bottom line.

I’ll give you some examples.

Living true to this lifecycle management mantra, renewal rates are very important, not just for us but for the partner as well. We both like recurring revenue streams, and we like predictable recurring revenue streams.

We’re introducing a gate, a tier, an accelerator for partners that have a better renewal rate. Renewing the customer also plays into your profitability, and doing a good job there can get you to new levels of profitability.

Think about that for a second when we say we need a lifecycle management mindset. We’ve used words like customer success in the past to depict that.

If we say, after we land, Mr. Partner, we need you to stay, make sure it gets adopted, make sure it grows, and make sure we expand, you’ve got to put some incentives behind that.

Having a higher renewal rate means I’m going to value you more because it’s very important to our mutual existence that we keep the customers we have. You do that by delighting them and making sure they’re happy.

That renewal gate is exciting because it signals the need for proper lifecycle management.

The second piece is the additional incentives for cross-selling the portfolio.

After you’ve landed, here’s a healthy rebate for a new-logo landing. That’s great. But let’s say a year and a half down the road, you introduce the Kubernetes platform. We’re going to treat that almost like a new logo, too.

That’s a new landing, an expansion, and a big win. It becomes very sticky. The customer’s investment in and value from Nutanix grows exponentially when multiple products are deployed, which also means a greater focus on adoption and expansion.

All these things are tied together.

The last piece I’ll say on whether a partner doing the same thing next year will make more money is: pay attention to services more than you’ve ever done before.

Get ready for services, because Nutanix is paving the way for you to be the one that leads in services.

If you put in the time and effort to get ready for this — and it’s not as easy as it sounds — you will be rewarded.

Introducing new technologies like containers, which are the vehicle of choice for AI workloads, requires different skills. A lot of the Nutanix base comes from the hypervisor world and may not have those skills. They might have to hire inorganically to gain some of those skills.

But if you do, it will be a much more profitable proposition for you.

Robert Dutt: I want to circle back to services in a couple of minutes, but first I wanted to discuss the partner ecosystem a little bit.

You’re opening the door to systems integrators and consulting partners into Elevate, including opportunities for referrals.

Is that about attracting new types of partners, or recognizing that partners play different roles in different customers and engagements, and that those roles may be changing?

Christian Goffi: This is a formalization. We’ve worked with systems integrators for a long time, but we haven’t had them as a formal part of the Elevate program.

This year, we’re bringing them inside our tent and formalizing the relationship.

You’re absolutely right. Especially in an AI-driven world, the role of GSIs becomes more meaningful the larger the enterprise.

We want to have them in our tent, even though in most cases our transactions don’t run through them. They’re an influencer type that’s running the operation.

We wanted to make sure we have some way of motivating and incentivizing the right effort and the right behaviour.

We work very well with our GSI layer, and thankfully we have technology that helps solve customer problems. Our GSIs talk about Nutanix whether or not we have this in place.

But this is a way of saying we recognize that what you bring to the table is valuable, and we want you to feel embraced. That’s why we’re making you part of the Elevate program.

Robert Dutt: It certainly seems like ecosystems is one of the big words of the current time in terms of partner organizations and partner go-to-market.

How are you thinking about situations where one partner influences the decision, another transacts the deal, and maybe someone else delivers the services? How do you reward those different contributions without creating conflict?

Christian Goffi: That’s such a great question, and I don’t know that we have the perfect answer for you right now, Robert, because it’s a highly complex world.

I’ve learned a ton over the last three years in this journey Nutanix has been on by partnering so deeply with these other big brands.

We’ve found a way in our industry to partner like never before. My level of understanding of the Cisco operation, Dell, Everpure, NetApp, and AWS three years ago was nonexistent.

They had their world, their goals, and they wanted to sell their IP. We had ours, and seldom did we ever meet.

Now we’re doing events together all the time in front of customers and partners.

It’s not just, “Let’s do an event together because we have the same 10 partners we both want to go after. I’ll speak from 9 to 9:30, you speak from 9:30 to 10,” and then there are two disjointed stories.

We’re beyond that. Now the stories we tell, we’re presenting together.

It’s like, “What do you mean, Nutanix? You’re recommending that the customer keep their NetApp infrastructure?”

Yes, we are, because what we want is what’s best for the customer, and the customer wants to get value out of the assets they’ve already bought.

Having said that, I don’t know that it’s possible to properly incentivize every touchpoint.

Right now, we’re more in a place where we’re looking forward to each vendor winning in their own way as a result of working together, but not necessarily all of us having to carry the burden of incentivizing everybody individually.

It’s been fascinating and energizing to see what you can do when you have events like the Power of Three, with Nutanix, Cisco, and Everpure together in front of 200 customers.

Customers walk away feeling great because a lot of their questions have been answered. That part is exciting.

Robert Dutt: Services. The Powered by Nutanix: Verified Services initiative looks like an important part of this.

What kinds of services, especially new services, do you envision partners building around Nutanix, and how does the program help develop and differentiate those practices as partners look to grow them?

Christian Goffi: Where we find the partners getting the biggest value out of partnering with Nutanix are the ones building services practices around Nutanix.

It’s super important.

There are still some that just focus on resale and might outsource the services piece. That’s fine, depending on who you are and what you want to do.

But what we’ve found is that the ones showcasing the characteristics we want most — being nimble and adaptable — are the ones with services practices.

We want to do our part to motivate partners to go deeper into that: hire more people, gain more skills, and expand their skill base beyond where they are currently.

I mentioned Kubernetes and AI as areas of need, but there are others, too.

There’s understanding marketplace transactions and how to collaborate deeply with hyperscalers.

That’s not a foreign world that doesn’t matter to you anymore because you do basic resale. It very much matters because it matters to customers. You’ve got to be able to navigate that.

Going beyond services, sales capabilities and go-to-market have really tested us. We need more organizations that understand how to do three-to-five-year selling.

It’s about TCO. The financial side of positioning a solution has become more important than it was just a couple of years ago. It’s not just about the technology. It’s also about the positioning.

I haven’t even started talking about token economics and how that’s coming in as a monkey wrench into all of this.

All these are reasons why I emphasize so deeply that this phase of Elevate is about directing partners toward where the puck is going and where we need them to play, because we’re not going to succeed unless they do.

Robert Dutt: Within those services, how are you thinking about both the balance and the reward for project-based services like implementation, modernization, and consulting versus ongoing managed services?

Christian Goffi: It all starts with implementation, and implementation is very important right now.

I’ll use two words to make a point.

We all know about FOMO, the fear of missing out. Customers know they’ve got to do something about AI. They can’t do nothing.

But then there’s FOMU: the fear of messing up.

The fear of messing up comes from having an entire technology base where everyone knows one brand and is comfortable with that brand, and now they’re being challenged to migrate.

The resistance to change is real.

If I’m that technology leader for a customer who decides to move somewhere else, I need organizations that give me the comfort that I’m not going to mess up and get fired. That’s just the plain truth.

On the services side, we’re working on badges and ways that partners can showcase to the market that they’re verified by the vendor. That’s one of those things that makes a CIO feel good about the decision.

Put that alongside whether the solution is in the Leaders quadrant of the Magic Quadrant. That’s another thing that gives them safety and comfort.

Then, on top of that, a partner can say, “Here’s a highly complex migration I recently did. Let me tell you all about it. And by the way, I’ve done 25 of these over the last 14 months.”

All these things play into removing the fear of messing up.

We need partners to play that role, and it’s something I would argue we can’t do, because the fear of messing up isn’t only tied to the Nutanix product.

It’s tied to all the other vendors that are pulled into an AI strategy, and Nutanix is just a piece of the puzzle.

We can’t solve the entire puzzle. Partners can solve the puzzle.

It starts with credibility and implementation. That means initial consulting, initial design, the pros and cons of each option, and then safe implementation.

Then, obviously, there are managed services.

We’re looking more at financial models where customers wish to pay by the drink as opposed to paying everything up front. Managed services have more of an OpEx representation, and partners need to offer that.

It depends on what the customer wants to do. Do they want to keep it in-house? Do they want somebody else to manage it for them?

A good partner has a great services practice, an option for managed services, and can also do resale.

If you can offer all three, you’re really covering all the needs your customer might have.

Robert Dutt: What does the investment look like for a partner to become a Verified Services provider?

Christian Goffi: It depends on where they’re at.

If they don’t play in services at all, it’s obviously a heavier lift.

Those partners that are already doing a lot of migrations — which most of them are — when we ask, “Do you feel comfortable doing this?” they’re like, “Hey, what do you think I do all the time?”

They are doing this. They’ve figured it out. We’re just now putting our rubber stamp on their quality.

For partners already there, it’s really not a big lift. It’s a formalization and some shadowing. It’s not a big investment.

For some of the others, every time you need somebody to take a certification exam or spend time on enablement, that’s time they’re not producing revenue for you. There’s a cost associated with that.

We don’t consider it a heavy lift in money. It’s a medium lift, I would say, in time and effort to get there, but it’s a worthwhile lift in our opinion.

Robert Dutt: Obviously, there’s been a fair bit of disruption in the virtualization market over the past couple of years, to put it charitably, and you guys have positioned yourselves to benefit from customers considering their options.

How has that changed the opportunities you’re seeing in the channel, and how does the new program help partners capitalize?

Christian Goffi: Lots of changes, not just from our competition around us and how we’ve been nimble in partnering with others to get to a solution that fits, but also in understanding that the different technologies partners need to champion are changing and evolving.

From a product perspective, our partner program is now going to incentivize cross-selling more than we’ve ever done before.

Before, we focused more on landing. Now we’re focusing on expansion.

That expansion comes from cross-selling different product lines, like our AI engine and our Kubernetes engine. These require different skills that we didn’t require before.

As partners evolve and develop their skills in these areas, they can absolutely expect their profitability levels to increase.

It’s not just from upselling more licensing and hardware, which brings more margin. More importantly, their services capabilities will put them in a space where services margins lead the way.

For us as a vendor, I think we live in a world of reverse economics compared with a partner.

For us, licensing is a high-margin world. Selling services is a low-margin world.

You look at the yin and yang of partners, and it’s the complete opposite for them.

We want partners to lead with services, and when they lead with services, that’s their high-margin space. That’s where they can do really well with Nutanix.

If you ask me two years from now who the partners are that succeeded the most, I’ll say it’s the ones that built their services practices effectively and became the most nimble and adaptable to the changing conditions of the market.

Robert Dutt: One of the things I’m really enjoying seeing over the last year is AI-powered capabilities within partner programs and partner portals.

You guys have certainly weighed in with some new AI-powered capabilities planned for Partner Central, including Deal Coach and greater visibility into customer health and adoption.

How do you see those tools changing the way partners manage their Nutanix businesses on a day-to-day basis?

Christian Goffi: AI is changing the way we all work, starting at an individual level.

Just three years ago, we had the issue of partners saying, “I’m not selling more Nutanix because I’m not too keen on how to position you or how you compare to your competitors. I need more information from you if you want me to be successful.”

AI has really turned that world upside down.

You can go into your LLM of choice now and ask, “I’m meeting with a customer who has a question about Nutanix. What are the three things I need to ask?”

You can get those answers. You don’t need me to get those answers.

How does Nutanix compare to its competitors? You don’t need me to answer that question anymore.

Now that partners are becoming very agile at figuring that out, we have to ask what we can bring to the table that public LLMs can’t.

That’s where the evolution of Partner Central comes in.

We’re doing a better job of bringing telemetry information to our partners. That’s not something they can get from ChatGPT.

Things like indicators about customer health, usage, and utilization. Those are gold for a partner who wants to be relevant in the eyes of that customer.

Partner Central is going to allow for that.

Deal Coach is something that hasn’t yet been released. We’re looking at the second half of our fiscal year to release it.

It’s that AI level of interaction with Nutanix-specific knowledge built in.

It’s asking the right questions so you can get not just positioning ideas, but relevant ideas that speak to the customer’s actual environment and when the renewal is coming up.

We’re excited about what Deal Coach can do to provide that difference between what partners can get on their own and what we can do as a vendor.

Look for that in the second half of the year.

AI is another example of survival of the quickest and most adaptable. We’re focusing not just on setting up the infrastructure, but also on user productivity.

Robert Dutt: So, to be clear, the visibility into customer health and adoption will be available pretty much right away, and Deal Coach is coming down the road?

Christian Goffi: That’s right.

Robert Dutt: Especially on the visibility side, do you see an opportunity for partners to use that information to identify new services or expansion opportunities before a customer even necessarily realizes they need them?

Christian Goffi: One hundred per cent.

This is the kind of thing customers want to see and hear from partners. Don’t wait for me to call you to tell you I need something.

What’s a great way to do exactly that? Come in with relevant information.

“Hey, I wanted to give you a health check. Let’s have a meeting to discuss how things are going. Are you happy with what you have? Are you utilizing it properly?”

All of us have been in rooms where we’re trying to renew something and find out that portions of it were never even activated.

Why would a customer renew something they don’t use? That’s a very awkward situation to be in.

It’s been a point of frustration for me and a lot of our partners that, throughout our history, they wait for the vendor to start the renewal process.

You’re a highly advanced partner with all kinds of capabilities, but you depend on me to tell you when to start talking to the customer about it?

There’s something wrong there.

You sold this deal three years ago. You knew it was a three-year deal. Why don’t you have checkpoints at year one, year two, or every six months?

Part of that is on the partner, but part of it is on us.

What kind of information are we making available so partners can be effective at those checkpoints?

The checkpoint shouldn’t just be, “How are things going? Can I help you?”

It should be, “Let me tell you how things are going, and here’s what I think you should do.”

Partners that can grab onto that telemetry data and turn it into BI, into business intelligence, are bringing a service. They’re bringing something customers want to hear.

Customers aren’t going to hear from just a salesperson who wants to sell something. They’re going to hear from somebody they need.

To me, that’s the difference between a channel and a partner.

Robert Dutt: Let’s bring this home to Canada for a moment.

Are there particular opportunities you see for Canadian partners under the new program, especially smaller regional partners that may not have the resources of a large SI?

Christian Goffi: Canada is such a service-provider-dominated region, with a lot of telco presence that customers have leaned on for managed services forever.

You find that interesting place between the big GSIs and the service providers. Somewhere in the middle, you’ve got these regional players.

Those regional players have done really well with Nutanix throughout our history because Nutanix has been a super nimble, innovative technology.

At the beginning of our existence, it was more those regional players that made a name for themselves leveraging Nutanix.

Now those smaller regional players find themselves with a really nice book of Nutanix customers who continue to renew and stay with Nutanix. They love working with Nutanix.

The incentives we have for landing customers also extend to the reps and the SEs. It’s not just the company.

We’ve introduced a better way of addressing the situation where the incentives are rich, but they go to the company and don’t necessarily motivate the individual seller as much.

We’ve found a good balance in how to do both.

Especially with regional players, that’s almost a bigger thing. If they see that the vendor is helping with profitability individually for the rep and the SE, that goes a long way because it takes a little pressure off the company.

Some of the really large national or GSI players might not even opt in to individual rebates because they prefer to keep things in a more programmatic manner.

But I see a bright future for regional players in places like Canada, just as in Latin America and other non-U.S. markets.

They made a name for themselves with Nutanix, and I think that will continue if they remain aggressive in new customer acquisition.

Robert Dutt: And just for clarity, are all the incentives, new benefits, and program changes available in Canada from the outset, or are there regional differences partners need to understand?

Christian Goffi: No, they’re all available in Canada just like they are in the U.S.

Robert Dutt: A two-headed closer for me.

For an existing Nutanix partner listening to this, what’s the first thing you’d encourage them to do differently as a result of the changes you’re making today?

And for a partner who’s been looking at Nutanix but maybe hasn’t yet made that investment, what would you tell them about the opportunity right now?

Christian Goffi: To existing partners, I would remind them that we live in an industry where evolution is a requirement.

If you’re standing still, you’re moving backward. We need to evolve.

This is a call to action that we need to continue to evolve. Even though we say this every year, it feels like it matters more now because of the big motivating factor of AI.

Mark my words, we’ll look five years from now, and there will be some big players now that might not be there. There will be some small players now that will be huge then.

It all depends on their ability to adapt to changing conditions.

My call to action to existing partners is to read the tea leaves. Look at the new technologies that are coming up. Don’t be shy about investing in yourselves so your competencies can speak for you.

There’s no better time to land a new customer than now because there’s so much disruption from other vendors, and alternatives are being sought.

If you’re the best at articulating what that alternative is and removing the fear of messing up in the process, you will win.

That’s what I want them to take away, and the changes we’re making to the partner program are absolutely in line with that.

For a potential new reseller that hasn’t worked with Nutanix before, I would take a very hard look at Nutanix and look at what it can be in your toolbox.

If you’re a reseller, you’re looking at your solution set, your toolbox, and what you have in it. Those tools are your value to your customer base.

Nutanix represents a tool that gives you the ability to look a customer in the face and say, “It’s about your choices. If you don’t want to be locked in, this is one of the things you should look at. If you want to leverage the assets you already have, this is something you should look at. If you want to control your token costs, this is something you should look at.”

These aren’t technology-related things. They’re business-value-related things.

That’s what Nutanix represents to a reseller in my eyes: a very nimble, open-concept way of appealing to what the customer might need and want.

That’s probably what I would say to a new partner.

Robert Dutt: Christian, I appreciate your taking the time to walk us through the changes to Elevate, and good luck in getting them out there.

Christian Goffi: I really appreciate your time, Robert. Thanks.

Robert Dutt: There you have it. Goffi, channel chief for the Americas at Nutanix, discussing the changes to the company’s Elevate Partner Program.

I’d like to thank Christian for taking the time, and thank you for listening today.

One of the things that stood out for me in that conversation is that Nutanix isn’t just looking to reward partners for selling more of its technology. It’s increasingly looking for partners that can develop deeper expertise, deliver services around the technology, and remain involved throughout the customer’s relationship with the platform.

As Goffi pointed out, that may require some partners to invest in new skills and capabilities, particularly as opportunities expand beyond traditional virtualization into areas like Kubernetes and AI.

But Nutanix is betting that those investments can translate into more profitable, sustainable businesses for its partners.

You can find out more about the Elevate changes at ChannelBuzz.ca, alongside our ongoing coverage of the Canadian IT channel.

If you’re enjoying the show, please do follow or subscribe in the podcast app of your choice. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the usual suspects.

And if you feel so inclined, please leave a rating or review. We appreciate it.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

[Music]

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, and today is Thursday, November 5, 2026.

We’ve got a major leadership announcement from HP today, a significant investment in AI engineering talent inside managed service providers, and a new collaborative AI offering from Hatz.

First up, HP has named its next chief executive officer, and it’s an interesting choice.

The company announced yesterday that Emma Walmsley will become CEO on January fourth, twenty twenty-seven.

She’ll succeed Bruce Broussard, who’s been serving as interim CEO since February.

Broussard will move into the role of board chair, replacing Chip Bergh.

What’s particularly interesting about Walmsley’s appointment is her background.

She spent nearly nine years as CEO of pharmaceutical company GSK, where she led a significant transformation of the business, including the separation of its consumer healthcare operations.

Before GSK, she spent seventeen years at L’Oréal.

And she’s also served on Microsoft’s board of directors for seven years.

So this is an experienced executive who has led major global businesses through substantial change, but she doesn’t have direct experience running a PC or printing company.

And that makes her appointment particularly interesting given where HP finds itself today.

The company is navigating a changing PC market, rising component costs, and the growing importance of AI-enabled devices and services.

HP’s board emphasized Walmsley’s experience leading organizations through transformation, and her ability to help the company capitalize on new opportunities as AI moves closer to the devices people use every day.

For channel partners, there aren’t any immediate program changes attached to the announcement.

But the choice of CEO could tell us something about the direction HP wants to take over the next several years.

Is the next phase of HP’s business primarily about selling more PCs and printers, or about building a broader set of products and services around how people work?

That’s a question worth watching as Walmsley takes over.

And there’s a Canadian connection to this week’s news.

We reported last Friday on leadership changes at HP Canada, with John Cammalleri stepping into the country’s top role on an interim basis as Michelle Biase moves to a U.S. leadership position.

So HP is going through significant leadership changes at both the Canadian and global levels.

Next, Evergreen’s Lyra Technology Group is making a substantial investment in helping its managed service providers deliver AI solutions.

Lyra announced yesterday that it’s formally launching a forward-deployed engineer program, with plans to place more than fifty engineers inside its MSP businesses by the end of twenty twenty-seven.

Sixteen engineers are already embedded across eight MSPs.

Now, forward-deployed engineering is becoming an increasingly important concept in the AI industry.

Essentially, it’s about putting engineering talent close to the customer, where they can understand how the business actually operates and build solutions around real problems.

And Lyra is adapting that model to managed services.

Rather than having a centralized team of consultants that MSPs call on occasionally, the engineers work full time inside individual MSP businesses.

They help those companies develop managed AI practices, work directly with customers, identify opportunities for automation and build solutions that can be used in day-to-day operations.

And that’s an interesting distinction.

MSPs already have relationships with their customers and understand many of the processes those businesses rely on.

But they may not have the specialized engineering talent required to build custom AI-powered workflows.

Evergreen’s approach is to use the scale of its ownership group to provide that talent to individual MSPs.

Lyra says it’s already seeing measurable results.

One example involves a professional services company called Scribcor Global.

Its MSP worked with forward-deployed engineering resources to build an AI-powered email-triage system around the company’s existing workflows.

According to Lyra, the result saves approximately forty-five minutes per employee per business day.

That’s a company-reported figure, but it’s a useful illustration of the kind of problem these engineers are supposed to solve.

And there’s a larger business-model question here for MSPs.

For years, managed services have largely been about keeping customer technology running, secure and available.

But AI creates an opportunity to move more directly into improving how a customer’s business operates.

That could mean automating repetitive work, connecting systems or developing new workflows that save employees time.

Those are potentially valuable services, but they also require different skills and a different approach to customer engagement.

Lyra’s program is an interesting attempt to bridge that gap.

And finally today, Hatz AI is expanding its managed AI platform with a new collaborative workspace called Spaces.

The company announced yesterday that Spaces is becoming part of Hatz Chat, its AI environment for small and midsized businesses delivered through managed service providers.

The idea is to move beyond the familiar model of one person having a conversation with an AI chatbot.

Instead, Spaces gives teams a shared environment where they can organize AI-assisted work around projects and business objectives.

That means employees can collaborate around the material they’re developing with AI, rather than leaving useful work isolated in individual chat histories.

And that may sound like a fairly straightforward product enhancement, but there’s a meaningful managed services angle here.

One of the challenges for MSPs helping customers adopt AI is moving beyond experimentation.

It’s relatively easy to give employees access to a chatbot and encourage them to try it.

It’s considerably harder to turn those experiments into repeatable processes that teams can actually use, share and manage.

Hatz is positioning Spaces as part of that next step.

The company already works with MSPs to deliver managed AI capabilities to SMB customers, and this adds another way for those partners to help customers organize their AI use.

For MSPs, that creates opportunities around onboarding, governance, training and ongoing support.

And there’s an interesting connection to our previous story.

Lyra is investing in the engineering talent required to build practical AI solutions inside customer businesses.

Hatz is developing a platform that could help MSPs bring more structure and collaboration to the way customers use AI.

They’re very different approaches, but both reflect the same broader shift.

The managed AI opportunity is moving beyond simply providing access to technology and toward helping customers use it to get meaningful work done.

You can find more details on all three stories at ChannelBuzz.ca.

And before we go, a couple of notes on In The Channel.

Something a bit different on In The Channel today. It’s not often the show breaks news just as it happens, but today, we’ve got full coverage of some substantial changes to a major partner program. Now technically, as this show goes live, it’s still under embargo, so we can’t say too much, but be sure to check out today’s episode for the full news.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s In The Channel featured a conversation with a Canadian senator about the challenges small and midsized businesses face when trying to access capital.

We recorded the discussion ahead of today’s federal budget, looking at why SME investment matters to Canada’s economy and what Ottawa could do to help.

Both episodes are available through ChannelBuzz.ca and wherever you get your podcasts.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt. Thanks for listening, and have a great day.

Robert Dutt: Hello, and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing you news and information about the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

Most of the businesses we talk about on this podcast are small and medium-sized Canadian companies. They’re building services practices, hiring people, developing new capabilities, expanding into new markets, and increasingly acquiring other businesses or becoming part of larger organizations.

And whether they’re looking to grow independently or participate in the consolidation we’re seeing across the IT services industry, access to capital is often an important part of the equation.

But is Canada’s financial system doing enough to support those businesses?

That’s the question at the heart of a recent report from the Senate’s Standing Committee on Banking, Commerce and the Economy, titled From Potential to Prosperity: The Urgent Case for Greater Investment in Canada’s SMEs.

The committee argues that Canada needs to do a better job of helping its small businesses become larger, more successful Canadian businesses. And with the federal budget coming Thursday, there’s an opportunity for the government to act on some of those recommendations.

My guest today is Senator Daryl Fridhandler of Alberta, a member of the committee who helped initiate the study and who brings decades of experience in corporate law and business financing to the discussion.

We talk about Canada’s risk-averse investment culture, why businesses built around intellectual property, expertise and recurring revenues can struggle to attract financing, and whether Canadian pension funds should be doing more to support domestic businesses.

We also explore the growing role of private equity in consolidating Canadian companies, the risks of seeing successful businesses and their intellectual property move abroad, and what the senator hopes to see in Thursday’s federal budget.

It’s a little different from our usual conversations about technology vendors and partner programs, but it gets to some of the fundamental questions about the environment in which Canadian IT businesses operate.

Let’s get right into it. My conversation with Senator Daryl Fridhandler.

Robert Dutt: Senator, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Senator Daryl Fridhandler: My pleasure, Rob.

Robert Dutt: A lot of the people listening to this podcast run or work for Canadian technology businesses, most of them small or medium-sized companies. And those who haven’t, especially those who’ve been in the business a long time, have had the pleasure of growing from a small business to something larger.

Whether they’re looking to hire, expand into new markets, develop new services, acquire or be acquired, access to capital is often a big part of the equation for their businesses and their lives.

Your committee’s just completed a study looking at how well Canada’s financial system serves those exact kinds of businesses, it sounds like. And some of the conclusions suggest there might be some room for improvement.

Let’s start with the big picture. What prompted the committee to undertake this study, and what did you discover in so doing?

Senator Fridhandler: So, interestingly, at Stampede 2025, at a breakfast, I was sitting with a president of an independent brokerage firm, the executive director of the Independent Dealers Association, and a president of a junior stock exchange.

They were talking to me about issues in the capital markets, and I said, “I hear you, and I think that the Banking, Commerce and the Economy Committee would be an ideal place to look into capital formation and capital availability.”

The way the Senate works, not to get too far into committees, is that when we’re not reviewing legislation that’s assigned to the committee, which is a priority, we will do special studies. We pick special studies based on pitches made by the members of the committee.

So I pitched a study on capital markets and capital availability.

And here we go: 15 meetings, 24 hours of hearings, 35 witnesses. I would have loved to have heard more. There were lots of great people who couldn’t fit it into their schedules, lots of great people waiting. But we had a robust, interesting, highly qualified set of witnesses who advised us on their views of the issues for SME capital availability.

Robert Dutt: What were the big lessons? What were your big takeaways from the study?

Senator Fridhandler: Well, there were lots, but I can highlight a few for your audience.

I rely on witnesses’ testimony. Jim Balsillie told us that 92 per cent of the S&P companies rely on intangible assets. I would not have even thought anything close to that.

Ninety-nine per cent of the Canadian workforce in the private sector is found in SMEs, 50 per cent of our GDP. Pension funds have $2.5 trillion under management. Deferred plans, almost similar — this is RRSPs, TFSAs — $2.5 trillion under management.

So there were a lot of numbers that really helped me see the lay of the land and what’s going on here. That was my big takeaway, and a lot of the ideas flowed from there.

Robert Dutt: Any major surprises in the testimony, especially given your own background in business and corporate finance?

Senator Fridhandler: Boy, a lot of it. I knew of the issues, but I didn’t know of the possible solutions. And hearing the witnesses helped weave some of the issues together.

For example, I always knew our banks were solid, risk-averse, lent on real estate, asked for your house as collateral or a guarantee if you didn’t have anything else that was a hard asset. I always knew that.

I didn’t know as much about the regulatory side of capital requirements.

We heard from Peter Routledge, the superintendent of financial institutions, on some of the numbers. In fact, a week after he testified, the capital requirements were reduced on a couple of items. He does really understand the issue at hand.

But the bigger picture is this whole risk aversion. It ripples through everything we do: the rules on our stock exchanges, our securities regulation. We’re very structured on not only protecting consumers, but ensuring sometimes they don’t even get to take risks.

It ripples through a lot of elements and players in our economy.

I’m not saying we should all go start blowing our brains out on prediction markets and spurious cryptocurrencies. But you can do all of that and you’re not regulated. Yet you can’t, unless you’re a wealthy person and an accredited investor, invest in a junior company.

This was highlighted by Professor Dan Wilson from the University of Calgary, who criticized the regulatory environment and the impact it has on junior markets on the public side. But even those regulations affect private companies when they’re trying to raise money from the public.

There are just so many rules and regulations that make us risk-averse. I think we’ve got to loosen up a little bit and encourage a little bit more activity.

Robert Dutt: One of the things that strikes me about that group in particular is that I think we do, in some ways, a good job of financing or supporting startups at the very beginning of the game.

And obviously major corporations can do what major corporations can do, but there’s that huge layer in between of successful small businesses that, as you point out, make up the core, in many ways, of the Canadian economy.

Those businesses, that middle layer of the sandwich, don’t really look like startups anymore, but haven’t quite reached the scale and size of a massive player.

Is the financial system doing a good job of supporting that group?

Senator Fridhandler: No. We need these national champions that remain domestic, that remain Canadian, that keep the talent here, that keep the jobs here.

I think a great recent example — and there have been some good things that have happened since the beginning of September, not necessarily simply because of our report, but I think there’s been an attitudinal change at the federal level and perhaps at the provincial level.

I was very pleased to hear about the funding of Cohere. Cohere is an absolutely important global player for Canada. Strategically, intellectually, we’re the champions of AI, and that’s our space.

Just like BlackBerry was however many decades ago, we need more Coheres, more BlackBerrys.

Unless we foster the growth out of the nursery, they’re just not going to happen here.

So yes, figuring out how to improve our scalability in this country is, I think, the whole focus of the report.

When we cheer because a Canadian company has become a unicorn and sold out to non-Canadian investors, and the next thing we know it’s getting moved, likely south of the border but perhaps to some other country, or primarily grown elsewhere with a satellite office in Canada, it’s wonderful that some money has been put in Canadian pockets.

But that’s not our goal.

We want to have the champions do everything here and have satellite offices elsewhere.

Robert Dutt: Many of the folks listening to this podcast are IT service providers. They aren’t necessarily developing productized software that they’re going to sell to other companies. They’re doing work for their customers in particular, or they’re doing infrastructure for their own use.

Their value isn’t in physical assets, buildings, equipment, those sorts of things. It’s in the people, the customer relationships, their expertise and their recurring service contracts.

Does the financial system adequately recognize the value of those kinds of businesses?

Senator Fridhandler: No. They’re structurally fundamental to everything we do.

I think I would start with what came to mind first, which is the government’s procurement policy: Buy Canadian.

There are lots of fences around when that kicks in, including, you know, you don’t have to buy pencils and paper clips. But there’s a level at which this stuff kicks in.

I think we’ve got to focus more on that Buy Canadian approach. It’s all-pervasive to SMEs across the board, and we have to do a better job on that, because the Government of Canada is probably one of the biggest players in the supply chain for these types of people and their businesses.

And so procurement policy.

In our report, we also talk about coordination.

It’s a great idea that Prime Minister Carney, out of the chute, set up the MPO, the Major Projects Office.

But I’d like to play the other side of the coin and have the minor projects office, the small projects office, the SME projects office, responsible for focusing all the government programs that exist across many departments through a responsible minister at the cabinet level, not a secretary of state.

We have a secretary of state for small business. That’s great. I’m not quite sure what happens there.

I want a minister of SMEs who is reportable to the cabinet and the Government of Canada on what they’re doing across the board for SMEs, and who coordinates everything that’s happening.

Some of this stuff may need specialized silos. In defence, we’ve got a lot going on. We’ve got a lot going on at Industry. We have things in probably every other department that relate to SMEs, whether it’s infrastructure, fisheries or something else.

There’s stuff happening, and I’m not quite sure that it isn’t in a lot of silos.

I think we can more efficiently and effectively support SMEs at the federal government level.

Robert Dutt: There’s no question we have substantial pools of investment capital available. You touched on the pension plans. We have institutional investors, yet we continue to hear that promising Canadian businesses struggle to get that financing.

Is that primarily a matter of, as you were saying earlier, the risk mentality? Or is there another source for that disconnect?

Senator Fridhandler: Unfortunately, we didn’t get to hear directly from the pension funds.

We did hear from the Canadian Bankers Association, but I’d prefer to hear directly from the bankers. We heard from some large family offices.

I think the feedback we were getting is that dealing with SMEs is too small, it’s below their radar, and they can’t dedicate the resources to manage the small investments.

And I say poppycock to that.

While I don’t purport to be an expert on the Caisse de dépôt and how they operate in a nationalistic fashion in Quebec, they invest globally and do a very decent job of supporting Quebec businesses.

I think we can do the same with our pension funds at the national level.

The percentage of capital deployed in Canada is obscenely minuscule, and I think that’s shameful.

If you review the mandate of the pension fund board, it does speak primarily to the return on investment for supporting pensioners, whom they obviously need to support at the end of the day. That’s their purpose.

But I think there’s room in that mandate to focus on supporting the Canadian economy, where many of those pensioners live.

As I’ve said, there’s been some light since September. There have been a number of pension funds that have announced deployment of capital into various other venture funds, or establishing venture funds.

It’s largely been focused on probably larger enterprises and infrastructure. I haven’t heard a lot that flows down to the SME.

Our report has a recommendation that we look at the mandates and how we might legislatively affect the deployment of these massive pools of capital.

Prime Minister Carney, at his investment conference, was primarily seeking foreign direct investment into Canada, although the program was sponsored by two major Canadian pension funds. I think the targets were non-domestic investors.

But I think that out of that, it had people start thinking about what we’re doing domestically.

I believe the target was to attract a trillion dollars over the next 10 years, $500 billion over the next five.

I think that capital exists in Canada. I think we can do a lot on our own, although we shouldn’t do it on our own. We should co-invest. We should work with foreign investors.

But we should lead, and it should flow right down to the nurseries of SMEs.

And it can be done.

I believe these pension funds can set up their own departments if they really wanted to. I think moral suasion from the government should convince them that they should start doing that.

But there can also be legislative measures. They can co-invest with other funds that are focused on SMEs, whether broadly or sectorally.

They don’t need to staff up on their own if they think that’s not going to work well for them. There are lots of players in this country that they can co-invest with, and they do a little bit of that. The government does some of that through BDC.

But what we hear is that it takes a lot of time.

The government programs put the money out. They select some players through BDC who are going to operate the funds after a call for proposals.

Then the funds they select have to go out and raise some matching capital, build the fund, and eventually they can do an intake of applications.

By that time, you’re two or three years out, and all these SMEs have been standing there looking for a place to grow and scale up their businesses.

By that point in time, they’ve either withered on the vine or they’ve sold out to non-domestic concerns and moved elsewhere.

We lose the people, too.

I don’t have the numbers on it, but I believe there are a lot of Canadians working in Silicon Valley who would love to be back in Canada if the capital was here.

Some of them, if the personal tax environment was better too, and a few other things.

There are things we propose in our recommendations that tweak a bunch of these things around the edges for SMEs that we think would be helpful.

Robert Dutt: Along those lines, one of the significant trends in the Canadian IT services market is consolidation.

We’re seeing independently owned businesses acquired or combined into larger organizations, often backed by private equity.

Sometimes that capital is Canadian, but frequently there’s American or other international investment involved.

Is that a healthy sign that Canadian businesses are attracting investment, or should we be concerned that some of our more successful smaller companies ultimately end up under foreign ownership?

Senator Fridhandler: Yeah, that’s my big concern, hollowing out the Canadian economy and ownership.

I think we went through that in the ’60s and ’70s when we first brought in FIRA, the Foreign Investment Review Agency, because we were concerned that we were selling out.

There’s got to be a balance of foreign investment.

I don’t want to see all of this talent leave. I don’t want to see all of this IP and great people leave the country.

I’m going to circle back to this: we’ve got to be a place that builds global champions, not just one every decade or two.

We put billions of dollars into R&D in universities and research institutions, and then it kind of floats around and might get taken up.

Again, another thing we recognized from our witnesses and our report is that we have to see that activated with hubs that are focused on those industries and on commercialization.

We had an entity, one that I’m familiar with, SDTC some years ago, Sustainable Development Technology Canada.

They funded a lot of startup technology projects, but when we got close to commercialization, we backed away.

I like what the government’s done with Cohere.

Don’t be afraid of engaging, if the capital’s not otherwise there, in supporting commercialization of Canadian champions.

We need to do it. We will do well in the end.

I know some people will say government shouldn’t be investing our tax dollars in private-sector businesses. But those same people will say, “We do want those global champions.”

So we’ve got to make it happen. We’ve got to bite the bullet and take our chances.

Rather than just granting and giving away money, take equity stakes and help them grow. Push our IP.

I just don’t want to see this stuff leaving the country.

Robert Dutt: And especially right now, this is obviously the trend that’s shaping the industry we’re talking about in particular, but every industry right now: artificial intelligence.

We’re in this period where AI could dramatically change how businesses operate, where new investment in technology and skills is going to be critical.

And it seems like there’s a risk here that we don’t catch that next Cohere, whatever that may be, early enough in the game for them to reach that level, or that some of these businesses are, as I believe you said earlier, withering on the vine on the way to that scale.

Senator Fridhandler: Rob, we’re like three days early. The budget’s Thursday.

Minister Champagne was speaking yesterday in Toronto and talked about how this is going to be a budget for entrepreneurs and innovators.

Boy, that was music to my ears.

So let’s see. I look forward to going into the lockup and reading the budget, and hopefully ticking a lot of boxes, thinking the government’s hearing what the players are saying.

A lot of things in our report, you’ll note that probably a third of our report is quoting witnesses, because we couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

I said, why should we rewrite what these people have said when they’ve articulated it?

When you hear from the CVCA, the Canadian Venture Capital Association, you hear from the angel investors’ association, you hear from entrepreneurs like Ruffolo and Balsillie, you hear from Shorefast, Zita Cobb, on building in small places across the country, we didn’t need to rewrite what they told us.

They’ve been saying this to the government longer than we’ve had our report issued.

So while I’m hoping to take credit for the government adopting 28 of our 36 recommendations, I know that’s not going to happen, and the credit wouldn’t be ours.

There’s a lot that’s been on the table, and maybe the time’s come. Knock on wood, maybe we’re there.

But we’ll continue to pursue this.

This report, for me, is a report where the committee has looked at what was happening. But I’ve committed to industry players who have been part of testifying that I’m not just behind them, I’m beside them, and I can be in front of them as need be to continue to advocate for recommendations and to hear further ideas that are going to help improve the situation for SMEs.

Robert Dutt: Throughout the conversation, you’ve shared a few of the recommendations of the committee and of the report.

Rather than walking through all eight, could you share maybe the two or three that you think will make the biggest difference, particularly for established businesses looking to grow?

Senator Fridhandler: Tax is a big driver of everything.

While we’ve grouped eight main titles for our recommendations, under each of them we have four or five. I think on tax we might have a dozen.

We’ve got to be able to compete toe-to-toe and be one better than our peers, what’s going on in America.

I’ve had people come to me over the years saying, “How do I exit with my business and personally out of Canada? Because the tax burden’s this, or I can’t do this.”

Tax drives a lot.

In our tax proposals, we talk about reducing personal tax rates, incentivizing tax benefits for certain industry segments where you might wish to see more activity, and rollovers for capital gains when you reinvest.

The oil and gas industry and the mining industry in this country have been built on flow-through shares.

Expand flow-through shares to tech companies and biopharma companies, companies that have to spend a lot of money at the front end and don’t need to shelter it because they don’t have revenue until years out.

That was the state of affairs with junior oil and gas companies years ago. You had to spend a bunch of money to get going before you had revenue.

You don’t need those write-offs right away. You can renounce them to investors. That then makes it easier.

When I talk about my professional experience and my personal experience, I know at the end of each year everyone was running around saying, “Where are some good flow-through shares I can buy to reduce my taxes payable?”

And that benefits these smaller companies.

I’d like to say that in 2025, the platform of the Liberal government in that campaign was that they were going to introduce a broader array of flow-through shares in sectors that would be interesting to your audience.

Maybe it’s going to happen on Thursday. Let’s hope.

Robert Dutt: A nice teaser there. We’ll find out in the not-too-distant future.

Senator Fridhandler: I’ll be barking about it if it doesn’t happen.

Robert Dutt: There you go. You have a chance to cheer or bark, so either way.

Finally for me, I’d like to bring this back to the Canadian entrepreneurs listening to this.

Many of them have spent a long time building successful businesses, and especially in our cohort, there are a lot of folks who are now thinking about the next stage of growth.

Based on everything you’ve heard during the study, the testimony, and your own experience in finance, what would you most want those business owners to understand about the Canadian financing environment? And what gives you hope that things can improve from where they’re at today?

Senator Fridhandler: I think I’d want them to know that I have hope.

I think there are lots of significant players in the capital market space, everything from the stock exchanges to the securities regulators to the various CVCA, Canadian angel investor and independent dealers’ associations, that are out there banging the tables.

I think things are going to improve.

As I said, when I was reading the reports on Minister Champagne’s speech in Toronto yesterday, I saw an improvement because you’ve seen movement on deployment of capital since September.

Maybe it’s moral suasion from the leadership in this country, but I think there’s a realization that we need to be a little bit more nationalistic, not just on fighting about tariffs, but figuring out how we help everybody scale up in this country.

This nationalistic sentiment exists, and your audience should feel like it’s going to be there to benefit them.

We’re going to not make it just a passing thought. It’s going to become fundamental to improving the Canadian economy, productivity and the environment for SMEs to grow in this country.

Robert Dutt: All right, Senator, once again, I appreciate your taking the time to talk to us, and I wish you good luck on many of those recommendations being reflected on Thursday.

Senator Fridhandler: Thanks a lot. Thanks for reaching out. Good to speak with you.

Robert Dutt: There you have it. Senator Daryl Fridhandler of Alberta, discussing the Senate Banking, Commerce and the Economy Committee’s report on improving access to capital for Canadian small and medium-sized businesses.

One of the things that struck me most about this conversation is that Canada’s challenge isn’t necessarily a lack of investment capital. It’s making sure that capital can reach the businesses that need it, particularly established companies looking to take the next step in their growth.

And as the senator points out, there’s a broader question about what happens when Canadian businesses can’t find the financing they need at home, and whether we’re doing enough to build and retain successful Canadian companies.

Of course, the timing of the conversation is particularly interesting. The federal budget arrives tomorrow, and Senator Fridhandler has some fairly specific ideas about what he’d like to see in it.

We’ll be watching to see how many of those ideas make it into the government’s plans.

My thanks to Senator Fridhandler for joining us, and thank you for listening today.

If you’re enjoying the podcast, please do subscribe or follow as your podcast app allows. You’ll find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most of the usual suspects, and of course ratings and reviews are always appreciated.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you In The Channel.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, and today is Wednesday, November 4, 2026. Here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

We’ve got three stories today about helping customers make better technology decisions and manage increasingly complicated environments.

HPE is expanding its CloudPhysics assessment tools, Cynet is adding new AI and identity security capabilities for managed service providers, and new CyberFOX research suggests that many smaller IT teams know exactly where their security gaps are, but don’t have the resources to close them.

First up, HPE is making some changes to CloudPhysics on GreenLake, its infrastructure assessment and planning technology.

The company announced yesterday that CloudPhysics 2.0 is adding expanded server modelling and deeper analysis of virtualized storage environments.

And while that may not sound like the flashiest technology announcement, there’s a useful channel story here.

Customers are facing some fairly complicated decisions about their existing infrastructure.

They may be approaching software licensing renewals, considering changes to their virtualization platforms, or trying to determine whether it’s time to refresh servers and storage.

And those decisions can have significant financial and operational consequences.

HPE’s pitch is that CloudPhysics can give partners and customers better information about what they already have, how it’s being used, and what their options might look like.

The expanded modelling and storage analysis are intended to support more informed comparisons as customers consider modernization projects.

For channel partners, that creates an opportunity to lead with assessment and advice rather than simply showing up with a product recommendation.

It’s also a way to start conversations before a customer has already made a decision about what technology to buy.

And that matters in a market where virtualization costs, infrastructure requirements and hybrid-cloud strategies are all under review.

The more clearly a partner can explain the business and technical implications of a customer’s options, the more value that partner can potentially bring to the relationship.

Next, Cynet is expanding its unified security platform with new capabilities focused on artificial intelligence and identity security.

The company announced yesterday that it’s adding AI Security features designed to help organizations discover AI applications, agents and generative AI services operating across their environments.

That includes shadow AI: tools employees may be using without formal approval or visibility from the IT department.

The new capabilities include approval management, exposure assessment, recommendations and reporting.

For managed service providers, the idea is to help customers understand what AI tools are being used, which ones are approved, and where those tools may be creating additional risk.

Cynet is also introducing enhanced identity security capabilities.

Those bring together identity risk, authentication activity and identity threat detection alerts, with guided investigation and response workflows.

And there are some operational improvements for MSPs as well.

Cynet says it’s adding forty SIEM integrations, expanding cross-customer email investigations, and making it possible to transfer endpoints between managed sites without reinstalling the security agent.

That last point may sound like a relatively small improvement, but anyone managing security across multiple customer environments knows how much time those routine operational tasks can consume.

The broader direction here is to bring AI and identity risk into the same security workflow as endpoints, networks, email and cloud services.

And that’s particularly relevant for MSPs, which need to manage increasingly complex security environments without creating a separate console and process for every new threat category.

One important availability note: the new AI and enhanced identity security capabilities are currently in beta for selected Cynet customers and partners.

So this is a development to watch, rather than a feature set that every Cynet partner can necessarily deploy immediately.

And finally today, new research from CyberFOX offers an interesting look at the gap between what smaller IT teams know they should be doing about security and what they can actually accomplish.

CyberFOX commissioned a survey of three hundred and sixty-one IT and cybersecurity leaders at small and midsized organizations.

Sixty-two percent said staffing limitations had left important security risks unaddressed.

And forty-six percent said their most significant known security gap had been open for at least six months.

That’s a pretty striking finding.

We’re not necessarily talking about organizations that don’t understand the risks.

We’re talking about organizations that know a problem exists but haven’t had the resources to resolve it.

The survey also found a disconnect between security principles and day-to-day practices.

Sixty percent said their organizations closely follow least-privilege principles.

But fifty-four percent said employees still retain standing administrator rights on their devices.

And only eight percent had fully replaced those standing administrator accounts with temporary elevation.

The staffing problem was especially pronounced among smaller IT teams.

Among respondents with fewer than fifteen IT staff, eighty-one percent reported unresolved security risks because of limited staffing.

That compares with thirty-seven percent among teams of fifteen to fifty people.

And here’s where the managed services opportunity becomes particularly clear.

Seventy-nine percent of those smaller IT teams reported using an MSP or MSSP for at least one IT or cybersecurity function.

That’s a useful reminder that the value of managed services isn’t always about delivering the most sophisticated technology.

Sometimes it’s about making sure important security controls are actually implemented, maintained and working consistently.

There’s an AI governance angle here as well.

Seventy-seven percent of respondents said their organizations allow employees to use generative AI tools for work, but only sixteen percent reported having comprehensive AI policies.

Now, this is vendor-commissioned research, and the findings shouldn’t be treated as a direct measurement of the Canadian market.

But the broader issue will sound familiar to plenty of Canadian MSPs.

Customers are being asked to do more around security, compliance and AI governance, often without adding the people required to manage all of it.

And that creates an opportunity for partners that can make security more manageable, repeatable and sustainable.

You can find more details on all three stories at ChannelBuzz.ca.

And before we go, a couple of notes on In The Channel.

Later today on In The Channel, we’ve got something a little different: my conversation with a Canadian senator about the challenges small and midsized businesses face when trying to access capital.

We recorded the conversation ahead of tomorrow’s federal budget, and discussed why investment in smaller businesses matters to Canada’s economy and what Ottawa could do to help.

It’s not our usual technology vendor or partner-program conversation, but it’s a timely discussion about an issue that affects businesses across the Canadian economy, including the IT channel.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s In The Channel featured Meredith Payne of TD SYNNEX, recorded at Inspire Canada in Toronto.

We discussed how PartnerFirst is moving beyond the traditional distributor portal, the Canadian rollout of MyShop, and how agentic commerce could reshape the way partners interact with distributors.

Both episodes are available through ChannelBuzz.ca and wherever you get your podcasts.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines. I’m Robert Dutt. Thanks for listening, and have a great day.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

For decades, one of the defining features of the relationship between IT distributors and their reseller partners has been the distributor portal. Need to check inventory, get pricing, build a quote, place an order? Log in, find what you need, get it done.

But what happens when partners no longer need to go to the distributor’s systems to do those things? What if they can bring those capabilities into the applications they already use, or even have AI agents handle some of the work on their behalf?

That’s a big part of the vision behind TD SYNNEX’s PartnerFirst platform, which was a major focus at the distributor’s Inspire Canada event in Toronto last week.

TD SYNNEX says more than 4,000 Canadian partner organizations are now using PartnerFirst every month, and it’s expanding the platform with AI agents, configurable automated workflows and integrations that allow partners to connect their own AI tools directly to the distributor’s systems.

And the company sees a future where more of the routine work of interacting with distribution, including quoting and ordering, can happen automatically, potentially without a human needing to intervene at every step.

I sat down with Meredith Payne at Inspire to discuss that evolution, how TD SYNNEX is accommodating partners at very different stages of AI adoption, and what the company is learning from putting AI to work within its own business.

We also discussed the arrival of MyShop in Canada, how PartnerFirst is being adapted to the needs of different partners, and what the company is seeing in terms of adoption and business impact.

Let’s get right into it. My conversation with Meredith Payne of TD SYNNEX.

Robert Dutt: Meredith, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Meredith Payne: Of course. Yeah, I’m happy to be here.

Robert Dutt: I wanted to start with MyShop, since that was sort of discussed off the top, and then we’ll get into the PartnerFirst strategy.

Jessica McDowell announced this morning it’s launching in Canada. Let’s start there. How does what you do with MyShop differ from the traditional distributor-backed partner web store? What’s the timing for the launch, and what will Canadian partners be able to do that wasn’t possible before?

Meredith Payne: Sure. With MyShop, our goal is really to help bring the technology to our partners so they can leverage the expertise and stand that up, and be able to seamlessly drive that digital-first experience for their customers.

So as she mentioned, this is something that we’ve seen a lot of success in when we look at North America as a whole.

And with Canada, we’re looking at a very thoughtful launch. And so each of the partners that are coming on and starting to deploy MyShop within their own business, we’re handholding them very much through that process, making sure that the experience is set up exactly how they’re looking for it to be.

We’ve got opportunities to customize based on how much they want to offer their customers, how much flexibility they want to allow for them to go in and do things on their own, versus where they need to set up guardrails.

And so we’re really excited about MyShop expanding because, again, it just gives more of that opportunity for our partners to leverage the technology, using the expertise that we have already and leveraging some of what we’re already seeing success around, to ultimately grow their business, both with their existing customer base, but also going out and finding new customers as well through that offering.

Robert Dutt: It sounds like it’s a fairly bespoke process. You’re going deliberately with select partners. Is that about Canada?

Meredith Payne: That’s right. Yep, that’s right. So certainly continuing to expand, but those partners that are leaning in with us with this launch are getting that full customized experience to make sure that it’s successful.

We’re getting lots of feedback from the partners that are already working with us, and it’s been great so far. So we’re looking forward to seeing that continue to expand.

Robert Dutt: Okay. More broadly with PartnerFirst, one of the most interesting things, I think, about the direction things seem to be going recently is the move towards agents, MCP integrations.

Traditionally, it was partners went to the distributor’s portal to get things done, and there are a variety of opinions in the partner community about that particular model.

Now it seems like we’re talking a lot more about bringing what you guys do and what you’re able to do into the applications, the agents, the systems that partners are already using.

Is that sort of ultimately, at least at this moment, the goal for where you’re taking PartnerFirst?

Meredith Payne: Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head. I should be interviewing you.

Our approach with PartnerFirst, and specifically the way that we’re leveraging AI, is to meet partners where they are, the way that they work, right?

And what we have found is that it just looks different for everybody.

So we do still very much have those partners within our ecosystem who come into our system and they work that way, and it works well for them. And we’re not looking to disrupt those workflows.

Of course, we have ideas on how we can continue to improve there and work alongside them.

When we think about how AI is leveraged, Agent Bridge is a great way for them to kind of start entering into this game.

Okay, how do I leverage some of these predefined workflows that we’ve worked to build and implement those into my business, so we can start doing it in maybe a lower-risk, I guess, environment is how I would put it.

And then MCP. We do have partners who are a little bit more advanced, already been developing their own AI experiences.

And so with MCP, now they can connect those experiences directly into PartnerFirst.

And again, we’re not pushing them out of those workflows that work well for them and that they’ve spent time developing, but really meeting them where they are and helping to move forward together in that way.

So we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback, I’d say, from the approach itself.

And our goal is, yeah, we’re not looking to push everybody down one single path, but very much meet them where they are and work in the way that fits their business.

Robert Dutt: Fifty-odd actions available today in Digital Bridge MCP. What are you hearing from partners are some of the most useful things, the places where folks get started and actually start getting things done in that mode?

Meredith Payne: Yeah. I’ll tell you, it’s the simple tasks.

It’s the things where you might say, “Oh, that sounds like something maybe quite easy,” but how do they start leveraging these AI agents for quoting, for ordering on their behalf?

It’s the things that they’ve spent a lot of time, a lot of hours with their people, and now they can take these workflows and really, truly put those folks within their business on higher-value work.

So that’s where we’re seeing the most success so far, is just taking those everyday repeatable tasks that very much took a lot of the time from their teams and moving that over.

And then as they see that working, then let’s adopt one more. Let’s continue to expand.

But again, it feels lower risk because they can monitor how this is working. Are there things that we need to tweak and to correct before expanding into that next workflow?

Robert Dutt: For that partner who’s at that other end, that far end of really having integrated AI into their own operations and a firm understanding of MCP and integrating that into their workflows, how far are we off, do you think, from a point where that kind of partner can realistically hand off as much as possible?

Obviously, there are going to be some things in a distributor-to-partner relationship that require human intervention.

But how far are we off from basically, I’m not going to have to log in to do this. I can do it all agentically to some degree?

Meredith Payne: I would say the answer is going to be different for everybody, right?

So based on the workflow that they have in place and what they’re truly doing in that, it’s going to look a little bit different for everybody.

But what we are seeing is that, as we’re looking ahead, partners are talking about having a true agentic commerce system in place.

And so they can truly hand over that ordering without having a human in the loop and feel confident about the results that they’re going to see.

So I don’t know that I could give you a timeframe on what that would look like for every single partner, but I think we’re a lot closer than maybe some would expect.

Robert Dutt: For the partner, you touched on kind of those early friction-removing integrations. For a smaller partner who’s just dipping their toe into it, are there any common or best first steps in terms of, this is what I should look at doing first?

Meredith Payne: Start with the task that you see your team spending the most time on, and the ones that are repeatable, right?

So it’s about asking that question: What are your teams spending their time on each and every day? What of that is repeatable?

And let’s take that and move it so they can focus on the higher-value work.

Robert Dutt: Okay. You guys have a huge scale across North America and globally, but we’ve heard throughout the day that the Canadian market has its own requirements, whether that’s regionally, linguistically, et cetera. And Canadian partners can sometimes operate differently.

As PartnerFirst becomes more embedded in partners’ workflows, how do you make sure it reflects that reality, kind of finding that balance between a global platform and local relevance?

Meredith Payne: Sure. That’s a great question.

And I would just say everything that we’re doing is done very thoughtfully, right?

So one piece of the approach that we’ve taken is by listening.

We’ve got a really great community of partners across both the U.S. and Canada who lean in and they give us a lot of feedback.

And oftentimes we’re building these capabilities together, truly, right? So they’re involved from the beginning. They’re part of the POC. We’re getting that feedback real time.

So when you see something announced, maybe on the stage at a big event like this, many partners in the room, they’ve been part of the process, right? We’ve done it together.

And so that’s no different for Canada.

And if there’s nuances that come up and things of, have we thought about this, or is that something that we’re building into the process, we can get it early, not having to fix it after we’ve already deployed that capability.

Robert Dutt: Beyond language and local currency, what have you found have been some of the things that the Canadian team are asking for, thinking about, that maybe hadn’t been on the map beforehand?

Meredith Payne: You know, it certainly varies by partner.

I don’t know if it’s as much a difference to the Canadian team from the U.S. as it is what type of customer are they supporting.

Because that’s where we kind of see some of those differences, is what you see from a healthcare customer might look a little bit different from somebody that’s over on the SMB side.

And so that’s really where we’re leaning in and saying, let’s make sure we’re being thoughtful about the needs of these different end customers that our partners are supporting as we build these capabilities.

Robert Dutt: We heard the idea of Customer Zero today, and that’s, I think, common throughout the industry, the idea of drinking your own champagne or eating your own dog food, whichever analogy you prefer.

Including Chris talking about building, down to the level of building his own AI agent to help run the Canadian business.

How much of what you’re bringing to partners comes from the internal TD SYNNEX experience of deploying AI and learning how that works internally?

And what’s something that you learned in the TD SYNNEX journey that’s kind of changed how you bring partner-facing things to market?

Meredith Payne: I’ll answer the first question, and it’s just about everything.

I love when we share that because it’s so true, and I can say for myself, for my team, we’re living that every single day.

We’re trying something new that we haven’t done before. Sometimes it’s a huge success. Sometimes we’re like, okay, we tried that, didn’t work. Let’s pivot quickly.

And so we do very much try and fail forward, I’d say, and learn from those things that don’t work so we can pivot, we can get it right, and we can make sure that end product is something that we believe in, that we stand behind and that we have lived ourselves.

But I mean, some of the examples are when we talk about even how agents are being used. I know we’ve shared some of this, but our coworkers are building their own agents.

And we have a lot of agents out there right now.

And so it’s not this approach of, “Hey, here’s a few that you can use.” No, there’s thousands, right, that are being built.

And so then we can look and see what can we learn from these.

It’s our coworkers that are really inventing and helping us move in that direction.

Robert Dutt: Do you find a lot of that kind of personal-level, “Oh, hey, this is what I’ve been able to do. How can this help you in your business?” kind of learning?

As much as it’s great to have the on-high education and all that, that kind of peer-to-peer, “This is what’s worked for my business. This is how it could work for you.”

Meredith Payne: Absolutely.

And speaking of peer-to-peer, we work in a hybrid environment. And so we’re thankful that we get a lot of time in the office sitting next to somebody who maybe is solving a slightly different problem than what you are.

But I love that because when we walk through these spaces, you truly do see coworkers collaborating and sharing ideas.

And then ultimately, that gets shared with our customers, and it’s part of what we’re developing together.

So I think it’s very much a part of our culture and how we’re going about the work that I get to be a part of.

Robert Dutt: Jessica talked this morning about more than 75,000 partners, I think it was, or 75,000 users across partners, have been using PartnerFirst in the last five or six months or something along those lines.

And the partners who engage more deeply with digital are growing faster.

What are you seeing in terms of adoption, and especially the measurable business impact of being involved in PartnerFirst more deeply?

Meredith Payne: Sure. So one thing that we’ve seen over the last year — so we announced PartnerFirst about a year ago at this event — and at that time, there were still a good bit of partners who were logging in and just the basics.

Like, we’re coming here to place an order, to order a laptop, and then I’m on to my next thing.

And so the most exciting thing that I’ve gotten to see over this last year is that that’s no longer the case.

And the reason that you see a user count that’s so much higher than the unique customers that are leveraging PartnerFirst is because now you’ve got maybe a business owner who’s coming in and they’re really leaning into those insights.

They’re not placing orders necessarily. That’s somebody else’s role. But they’re leaning into these other value-added features that are available within our digital experience.

And so that’s been fun to see, is that there’s a little bit of something for everybody based on the user, based on how we can really equip you to do your job better.

Robert Dutt: What do you find are the common threads for partners who get the most out of it? Is it kind of willingness to engage, curiosity? What drives the value?

Meredith Payne: It’s the features, yeah.

So the ones who are engaging across multiple different functionalities and capabilities, those are the ones that are getting the most.

So it’s not just we’re coming in and leveraging your commerce system, but we’re actually logging in and taking advantage of the enablement offerings that you have within PartnerFirst.

We’re coming in, we’re connecting into these agents.

So that’s where I see the biggest differentiation, is the partners who have multiple different features that are intertwined within their business.

Robert Dutt: What’s your, internally, what’s your biggest measure for the success of PartnerFirst? What’s the thing that you look at that determines, yeah, we’re knocking this out of the park?

Meredith Payne: Yeah. We want to see our partners leveraging our digital experience to grow their business.

At the highest level, that’s what we want to see.

So if they’re growing their business by doing more within their existing customer base, great, we want to see that.

If they’re growing their business because now they have things like MyShop in place and they can go out and attract more customers, and they’ve got a wider stack of customers, or they’re leveraging AI Practice Builder, right, to go out and get into a new practice that maybe they haven’t felt as confident about before, ultimately that’s a win for us.

They’re using these capabilities that we’re offering through PartnerFirst to ultimately grow their business, and that’s what we want to see.

Robert Dutt: All right. Without asking you to pre-announce anything, although if you want to, I’m not going to argue with you.

If we’re sitting here next year at Inspire, what do you expect PartnerFirst is going to look like directionally, strategically, compared to where we’re at today?

Basically, what can partners expect over the near future from PartnerFirst?

Meredith Payne: I certainly won’t pre-announce anything.

But what I will say is I think that you’ll just see more confidence from the partners that are leveraging it.

You’ll continue to see us doing more with AI. So that’ll continue to grow, of course.

But at the end of the day, none of us know what a year looks like from now.

But what I am confident in is that we’ve got just a fabulous group of coworkers that are working on this every single day, and we’re set up in a way where we can act really fast.

We’re testing so many things right now. And so when we see those signals in the market, we’re equipped to move quickly and to do that alongside our partners in a way that’s meaningful and impactful for them.

Robert Dutt: Wild times and fascinating stuff.

Meredith Payne: Oh, yeah.

Robert Dutt: Thanks so much for taking the time.

Meredith Payne: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Robert Dutt: There you have it, Meredith Payne of TD SYNNEX speaking with me at Inspire Canada in Toronto.

What I found particularly interesting about this conversation was the idea that the future of the distributor portal might not really be a portal at all.

TD SYNNEX isn’t abandoning PartnerFirst as a destination for partners who prefer to work that way, but it’s increasingly making the capabilities behind the platform available through AI agents and integrations with partners’ own systems.

That could change quite significantly how partners interact with distribution, particularly as those agents move beyond finding information and preparing quotes towards actually completing transactions.

As Meredith pointed out, partners don’t necessarily need to start with something that ambitious.

Automating a single repetitive task can be a useful first step, freeing up time for the work that creates more value for customers.

My thanks to Meredith and the TD SYNNEX team for making the conversation possible.

And thanks to you for listening. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll talk to you next time on In the Channel.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, and today is Tuesday, November 3, 2026.

We’ve got some remarkable numbers from the North American IT distribution market today, along with a new security integration aimed at managed service providers, and an expanded partnership between Microsoft and Lumen focused on the networking requirements of enterprise AI.

First up, new research from IDC shows just how dramatically AI infrastructure demand is changing the technology distribution business.

According to figures released yesterday, North American IT distribution revenue reached a record twenty-eight point nine billion dollars in the third quarter of twenty twenty-six.

That’s an increase of twenty-nine point two percent from the same period last year.

And while that’s an impressive headline number, the breakdown of where that growth came from is even more interesting.

IDC says enterprise infrastructure revenue increased by a remarkable one hundred and forty percent.

Components and semiconductors grew nearly eighty percent, while network infrastructure revenue increased almost sixty-four percent.

Together, those three categories accounted for four point three billion dollars of the market’s six point five billion dollars in additional revenue.

In other words, about two-thirds of the entire increase came from the product categories most closely associated with building AI infrastructure.

And the growth wasn’t limited to hardware.

Software revenue increased twelve and a half percent, while services grew nearly twenty percent. Both categories also reached record levels.

IDC says AI infrastructure demand is increasingly moving beyond the hyperscalers, with enterprise customers and specialized cloud providers building more of their own capacity.

That’s particularly interesting for the channel, because distribution is one of the ways those customers get access to the servers, storage, networking and other technologies required for those projects.

But there are a couple of important qualifications to these numbers.

First, this is a North American report covering both the United States and Canada. IDC hasn’t provided a separate Canadian growth figure.

And second, not all of that revenue growth necessarily represents more equipment being sold.

IDC says rising memory and storage prices have contributed to the increase, and tight supplies of DRAM and NAND are expected to remain a challenge into twenty twenty-seven.

So we’re looking at a combination of very strong demand, rising prices and ongoing supply constraints.

For solution providers, that creates both opportunity and complexity.

There’s clearly substantial spending on AI infrastructure, but customers also need help navigating product availability, pricing, architecture and deployment.

And as we’ve discussed before, the opportunity doesn’t end with supplying the hardware.

Designing, securing, integrating and managing these increasingly complex environments is where partners can potentially build additional value.

Next, Guardz is bringing a new layer of browser security into its platform for managed service providers.

The company announced yesterday that it’s integrating Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Browser for Business into its broader security offering.

The idea is to bring browser activity into the same security picture as email, identity and endpoint information.

And that matters because so much of what employees do now happens inside a browser.

They access business applications, work with customer information, use cloud services and increasingly interact with AI tools.

That also makes the browser an attractive target for attackers.

Think about a phishing email that sends someone to a fake login page.

Prisma Browser can help block that malicious page, while Guardz can connect the browser event with the original email, the user’s Microsoft three sixty-five activity and information from the affected endpoint.

Instead of treating those as separate alerts from separate systems, the MSP and Guardz’s managed detection and response team can investigate the activity as a connected incident.

The integration also brings protection against malicious downloads, risky browser extensions and attacks designed to steal authenticated sessions.

Guardz is also expanding its controls around how employees use browser-based AI applications, including restrictions on moving sensitive information into services that an organization hasn’t approved.

For MSPs, the interesting part is the potential to add browser security to the services they’re already delivering, rather than creating another disconnected product to deploy and manage.

There is one important question for Canadian partners.

Guardz’s documentation describes regional restrictions on the Prisma Browser integration, and we haven’t confirmed its availability for Canadian customer environments.

So that’s something partners would need to clarify before making commitments to customers here.

But the larger direction is worth watching.

As more business activity moves into browsers and AI-powered applications, browser security is becoming a more important part of the overall managed security conversation.

And finally today, Microsoft and Lumen Technologies are expanding their collaboration around enterprise networking and artificial intelligence.

The companies announced yesterday that they’ll work more closely together to help customers connect the data, applications and infrastructure supporting AI workloads.

That may sound fairly straightforward, but it’s an increasingly important challenge.

Enterprise data and applications are often spread across public clouds, private data centres, branch offices and other environments.

And as companies begin deploying more sophisticated AI applications, those systems need to communicate reliably and securely.

Microsoft and Lumen want to bring networking decisions into the conversation earlier, alongside Azure modernization and AI infrastructure planning.

The expanded relationship includes joint account planning and co-selling, particularly where network transformation, cloud migration and AI deployment overlap.

Lumen also intends to bring more of its cloud networking and application connectivity capabilities into Microsoft’s Azure and Marketplace ecosystem over time.

Its Alkira cloud networking solution is already available through Microsoft Marketplace.

Now, this isn’t a new channel program announcement, and the companies haven’t outlined specific new partner incentives.

But it does point toward an important services opportunity.

Customers may be excited about AI models, applications and agents, but making those systems work across a real enterprise environment requires considerably more than buying computing capacity.

There are networking, security, data movement and integration challenges to solve.

And those are areas where experienced solution providers and systems integrators can play an important role.

It’s another reminder that the AI opportunity extends well beyond the AI technology itself.

You can find more details on all three stories at ChannelBuzz.ca.

And before we go, a couple of notes on In The Channel.

Later today on In The Channel, we’ve got my conversation with Meredith Payne of TD SYNNEX, recorded at last week’s Inspire Canada conference in Toronto.

We talk about how the distributor’s PartnerFirst strategy is evolving beyond the traditional partner portal, what the Canadian rollout of MyShop looks like, and how agentic commerce could change the way partners interact with distributors.

It’s an interesting look at how AI could reshape not just the products partners sell, but the processes they use to run their businesses.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s In The Channel featured my conversation with Chris Fabes, president of TD SYNNEX Canada.

We discussed where he sees the strongest near-term opportunities for Canadian partners, including cloud, cybersecurity and the changing economics of AI.

Both conversations are available through ChannelBuzz.ca and wherever you get your podcasts.

That’s The Buzz for Tuesday, November 3. I’m Robert Dutt. Thanks for listening, and have a great day.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.When I last spoke to Chris Fabes back in August, he was just getting settled into his new role as president of TD SYNNEX Canada. At the time, he was embarking on a listening tour, getting to know the business, its partners, and the opportunities and challenges facing the Canadian channel.

Fast forward about three months, and Fabes has had a chance to put some miles on the odometer, meet with partners across the country, and get a much clearer picture of where the business stands and where he wants to take it.

I caught up with him this week at TD SYNNEX Inspire Canada in Toronto, where the distributor is laying out its vision for helping partners navigate a technology market increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, new consumption models, and the growing importance of delivering business outcomes rather than simply selling products.

We discussed what Fabes has learned during his first few months, where he sees the most immediate growth opportunities for Canadian partners, and how TD SYNNEX is looking to expand its reach into new technologies and markets.

We also talked about what the recently announced acquisition of BlueStar could mean for the Canadian business, the company’s significant investment in a new distribution facility in Caledon, Ontario, and the economics of AI.

And we wrapped up with a look at how Fabes is putting AI to work in his own role, including an agent he built to keep him on top of the business.

Let’s get right into it, my chat with Fabes.

Robert Dutt: Chris, thanks for taking the time. I know it’s obviously a busy day here, but your first Inspire running the show here.

Chris Fabes: Yeah, thanks for being here. It’s been a big couple of days between today and yesterday. Well received, exciting, definitely a different position for me to be in, standing on the stage versus looking at the stage.

Robert Dutt: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that was really good.

When we spoke back in August, you were just getting started in the role. You were really fresh into what you talked about: listening, learning, understanding the business, understanding what partners want.

You’ve now spent about 90 days, I’m sure, travelling across Canada a whole lot, talking to partners, talking to your teammates. What have you learned that you didn’t know coming into the job? And has anything surprised you enough to change your thinking about where things are at, or where they’re going, for TD SYNNEX Canada or for the Canadian channel at large?

Chris Fabes: So you’re right. I’ve travelled quite a bit, and I did say I wanted to listen. And when we first spoke, it was, I guess, 30 days after. Very, very fresh. I still didn’t know what I didn’t know.

So it’s helped me shape the expectations, the excitement, the angst maybe that some have in terms of everything coming out of the channel expectations. So by having those conversations internally, as well as with our partners and vendors, it’s been great to shape where we’re going.

In terms of things that I would not have known or hadn’t expected, it’s been a pleasant — I’m cautious when I say the word surprise, but I’ll say that — because I’m coming in and I’m learning a lot about what our capabilities are.

And a lot of the conversations or the comments that were being generated from our customers, we’re actually able to fill a lot of those gaps with what we’ve built or what we’re building.

So coming into a business that my engagements in the past were a little bit more traditional in nature, but now seeing how TD SYNNEX is evolving the way that we approach the channel as an orchestrator, there’s so much more outside of the core distribution capabilities that we can offer.

So that has been a very, very pleasant, I guess, enhancement is the best way of saying it, to my view.

Robert Dutt: I guess playing into that, the state of the Canadian business. It’s a strong organization, clearly, but there’s economic uncertainty. We’re in the midst of some significant technology transformations, if you hadn’t noticed.

Chris Fabes: Sure. I don’t know if it would come up.

Robert Dutt: Basically, now that you’ve got a chance to look at things and have those conversations, how would you characterize the state of the business today? Where are you seeing momentum, and where are you hearing from partners that things are a little more challenging?

Chris Fabes: The foundation is absolutely solid. And that has been wonderful to see. Not only foundationally at our core, what we’ve been offering to our partners for decades, but also the plans in place to be able to grow where the market is going.

We talk about the distribution TAM expansion, because there’s a portion of the business in Canada that goes through the channel and there’s a portion that doesn’t.

We have plans to be able to continue to attract additional vendors into the ecosystem, make sure that, as you said, the chaos or the complexity of what’s happening right now — it could be as simple as we understand that these are the technology drivers that our customers are demanding. We need to ensure that we’re ready as a partner, we’ve got those capabilities being built or already built, and we’re having those conversations.

But also, the things that are a little bit more challenging for any one partner to understand, maybe collectively we can figure out together.

So helping our partners understand how to have AI practices built out that focus on outcomes, help them answer their customer questions around sovereignty of data, sovereignty of access, capabilities to expand province through province.

You heard Minister Evan Solomon spoke to us earlier this morning. Just engaging with understanding how we’re building our capabilities and then bringing that to the channel ecosystem, I think that’s going to be so important.

Robert Dutt: There was a lot of focus this morning on some interesting new opportunities, areas that maybe haven’t traditionally been channel space.

Between you and your team, you talked about defence, robotics, space, energy, agriculture and AI infrastructure, which of course has been the focus for a while for this group.

But that’s a pretty broad range. I’m curious about your thoughts on which of those new growth areas represent the biggest tangible near-term opportunity for Canadian partners, and how you guys see yourselves helping the partners reach that.

Chris Fabes: So in part, some of what you mentioned — space, robotics — those are a little bit more future-leaning.

In the near term, when you look at the spend and the needs of our Canadian customers, you’re looking at more of that software space, the cybersecurity wrap in terms of making sure that our data and our access and our individuals have a fully protected ecosystem.

So software, including cybersecurity, including cloud, and being able to navigate the tokenomics of that conversation, I think is going to be more of that near term.

It doesn’t change the way we look at our core. So we look at our core being endpoint solutions, advanced solutions. But really where we’re seeing the greatest growth happening is within that advanced solutions division.

And that’s where you see cloud. That’s where you see cyber. That’s where you see the advancements in physical AI, more than just the software application, but the combination of the two worlds.

And that’s what requires us to build, sign new contracts, be able to engage and enable our partners to be able to categorize or catalogue those offerings for their customers.

And it becomes very unique and niche based on those verticals. And that’s why I mentioned it. Agriculture needs different technology than a manufacturing sales floor does.

An AI infrastructure buildout that is focused on power and data flow is going to be different than what a retailer might need.

So we’re really trying to get closer to what the end customer requires, align with the partners that serve those end-customer verticals, and then be able to create those threads that our partners can then pull.

So they’re creating those outcomes through a more robust technology stack, which is, I think, what you were asking in terms of where we’re going near term and long term.

Robert Dutt: And I guess that’s where some of the new vendors potentially come in, in terms of folks who round out that story.

Chris Fabes: Absolutely. And there’s viable products coming from vendors that may be a little bit new to the ecosystem every day.

So we need to make sure that we’re looking at what are the products that may be of interest to our partners and customers. How do we bring that into the ecosystem, onboard, enable, activate?

And there’s many, many that are looking for knowledge of how to use the channel. How do I bring my product, instead of talking to every individual end customer, how do I then go and talk to thousands of business partners that we know really, really well, and then scale that model very, very efficiently?

And that’s where that orchestration comes into place that we’ve been talking about.

Robert Dutt: Shawn Ardiel made a point this morning that really connected with me, resonated and made me snicker a little bit: that in the AI era, the unit of value isn’t the product, it’s the outcome, and no single product delivers that whole solution.

Especially coming from distribution, where the language spoken has traditionally been SKUs, that’s a pretty broad change.

I think it’s played into some of your answers already so far. How does that mindset change the role that TD SYNNEX plays in the channel? I suspect it goes back to that orchestrator role that you’ve touched on.

Chris Fabes: It does. It goes to, in part, the budgeting conversation.

So how do I build technology that fits the budget, that’s consistent and predictable? Because you can provide AI solutions and you can overengineer and underestimate the budget very quickly.

But we believe we have visibility across that ecosystem where we can talk to our customers around when does it make sense to have a frontier model or a no-code or a low-code model?

How do we help you build your governance so that your users are applying the right applications and using the right models that effectively meet your budget aspirations?

Part of it is just understanding that complexity, simplifying it.

And as we say, we want to meet our partners where they are. Some are very advanced and some are just getting started. So we have to have that flexibility to go up, down, depending on the conversation and situation.

And that’s where many, many of our customers, to your question, when they hear about Destination AI or they hear about Launchpad, when they can start putting pen to paper, they start saying, “Aha, you’re helping me run my business, you’re helping me bring a full-scale solution to my customers, and you’re showing confidence in the partnership.”

Robert Dutt: Around that whole AI tokenomics and overall economics of AI discussion, you guys have recently launched FinOps Fusion.

Can you share a little bit of what you see the opportunity around that kind of business? It seems to play nicely into what you’re talking about around helping partners understand what model for what solution and getting a grip on the ongoing cost of those on behalf of customers.

Chris Fabes: So FinOps Fusion is a recent announcement for Canada. So I’m not fully read into the exact impacts or how it lands to our customers. So I would suggest that there’s an alternative individual that you’d want to speak to on that.

But what I will say is we have highlighted the promise to many of our partners, and we’ve suggested that they go have conversations with the dedicated teams, because that’s a real critical problem that they’re seeing.

They do not want to overpromise or underpromise and be caught with the gotcha of the budget overages.

So I believe that as we work with our partners, we will provide them with that predictability, the visibility and the management that’s required to have strong conversations.

Robert Dutt: Speaking of new areas of business, the acquisition of BlueStar is interesting because it brings a whole different set of capabilities in mobility, identification, point of sale, the intersection of physical and digital, and a big Canadian presence historically.

What does that acquisition mean to the business here for TD SYNNEX?

Chris Fabes: So the acquisition, it’s only been recently announced. So we’re working through what the next steps might look like. We’ll continue to operate as separate businesses until future decisions are made.

But to your point, there really isn’t much overlap. It really does provide a lot of complementarity.

In talking to some of our partners, when you start looking at the optimization of the technology stacks, the optimization of capital, the optimization of stocking and logistics and the associated services, there’s definitely been early excitement to say, “This is a value-add to our business.”

But it also provides us additional potential access to very specialized markets that, again, are complementary to us.

And to your point, the Canadian individuals with BlueStar, the Canadian locations and their ability to reach those markets, it’s absolutely exciting. And it’s been perceived by our partners very positively, and we’re looking forward to continuing to work with the team.

Robert Dutt: I know it’s early days. Not much overlap in terms of technology and vendor lineup, I’d imagine, and probably not as much as one might expect on the partner side.

It potentially brings a new variety of partners, or a new import to a variety of partners, to TD SYNNEX.

Chris Fabes: That’s what we believe.

So it’s been an exciting conversation in terms of not just the product sets or the specialized services, but also the partners in which they would engage with.

There are a lot of — I mentioned complementarity, but there’s also adjacencies and incremental opportunities to be talking with partners, but also specific markets that we may not have otherwise been engaged with.

So as we unwrap this or tease on that thread a little bit more, I can only expect exciting things to come.

Robert Dutt: You talked today about the new 850,000-square-foot facility in Caledon and described Canada as getting some of the most advanced logistics technology first, I imagine by virtue of being the new facility on the block.

I understand that’s not coming online for a year or more yet, but what does the investment say about, A, the commitment to Canada, and what does it change for your partners when it does come online?

Chris Fabes: So it’s early days. We expect this to come online mid-2028.

We’re definitely excited in terms of size, capabilities of the technology that we’ll be applying.

It provides us with expanded capabilities nationwide. And I think there’s an excitement around scale, cost to serve, and looking at just leaning into the Canadian economy.

I think it’s a meaningful investment that we’re making. I think it gives us an edge in terms of what we do, but also more specifically what we’ve been discussing.

It provides us the ability to look forward and ask ourselves the questions: what can this provide us the capability of doing in the future?

So it’s exciting, but I can tell you that as we come back together in the future, we’ll have more details in terms of exactly how it’s going to land, what it’s going to mean for our partners and our customers in Canada.

But I’m hoping that it’s very exciting to hear that we are investing and we’re looking to lean in in a very passionate way.

Robert Dutt: Yeah, I imagine not too much can be completely locked in well over a year out, especially in this industry and the pace at which things change around here.

Chris Fabes: Exactly.

Robert Dutt: You talked a little bit about the journey internally for TD SYNNEX Canada with AI, and you shared that you had built out your own agent and it was helping.

Without giving away too much of the secret sauce, what does the agent really do? What does it do for you? What does it help you do better? And what did you learn from the experience?

Chris Fabes: It’s a good question.

So what I could say is, and back to some of the other conversations we had in terms of coming into this business, it’s a big, complex business, right?

We have many partners. We have many lines of orders that come in every single day. We have various systems that need to connect the dots around what matters to drive our business. What does success look like?

So what I was looking for is, how do I get meaningful information for me as needed every single day so I understand what needs to be decided, what is still pending, showing me what might be a hot button over others, and how are we producing year on year versus against plan?

So it allows me to have immediate conversations with various divisions so that we can close on open actions. I can see what’s going well on a daily basis.

So for me, it’s really a briefing agent, a presidential briefing agent, and I was able to code it very much curated for what I needed.

And what it showed me or what it proved to me was a lot less time searching, having conversations, and meaningful action right away.

So I start my day already going into conversations about what’s next, versus asking the questions of, “What have we done? What else is needed? Who’s involved?”

So yes, time savings. It was a nice experience for me, but I also know that this is probably even junior coding.

But I’m still happy that I was able to do it myself, and I trust the rest of my team that are much smarter around agent creation to build some more relevant, bigger, impactful agents in the future.

And I’ll just use those.

Robert Dutt: It’ll be interesting to see where it goes. Once again, I want to thank you for taking the time.

Chris Fabes: Absolutely. Happy to be here. Thanks for your time.

Robert Dutt: Chris Fabes, president of TD SYNNEX Canada, speaking with me at TD SYNNEX Inspire Canada in Toronto.

One of the interesting takeaways for me was the distinction between some of the emerging opportunities TD SYNNEX is exploring, including robotics, space and physical AI, and the more immediate opportunities Fabes sees for Canadian partners in areas like cloud, cybersecurity and helping customers manage the economics of AI.

There’s also an interesting longer-term story developing around how TD SYNNEX is expanding its role beyond traditional distribution, bringing new vendors and capabilities into the channel and helping partners put together more complete solutions for their customers.

My thanks to Chris and to the TD SYNNEX team for making the conversation possible.

And thank you for listening today. If you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to or follow the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, all the usual places.

And if you feel so inclined, please do a rating and a review.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, and today is Monday, November 2, 2026.

We’re starting the week with a major investment in Canada’s AI industry, a new managed storage offering from Arrow and NetApp, and an expansion of the partner ecosystem around agentic security company 7AI.

First up, the federal government is making a substantial investment in Canadian artificial intelligence developer Cohere.

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Thursday that Ottawa will take an equity stake in the Toronto-founded company, committing up to one point six billion Canadian dollars.

The investment is part of a much larger financing effort by Cohere, which has announced the initial close of a Series E funding round targeting up to seven billion dollars.

Other investors include NVIDIA, Bell and Germany’s Schwarz Group.

And there are some significant commitments attached to the federal investment.

Cohere has agreed to maintain its Canadian headquarters and incorporation, create at least one thousand Canadian technical jobs, and invest at least one point seven billion dollars in additional Canadian computing infrastructure by twenty thirty.

The government’s investment will be made in stages, with reporting requirements tied to those commitments.

And there’s an important distinction here: this is an equity investment, not simply another government grant for AI development.

Ottawa is taking an ownership stake in Cohere, meaning Canadians would participate in the company’s financial success if that investment pays off.

For the Canadian technology industry, it’s another indication of how important sovereign AI infrastructure has become.

Cohere is positioning itself around secure enterprise AI, particularly for organizations that need greater control over their data, infrastructure and the way AI systems are deployed.

And those requirements are especially relevant in areas like government, financial services and other regulated industries.

Now, this isn’t a channel program announcement, and Cohere hasn’t laid out a new set of partner opportunities as part of the investment.

But there’s a broader question here for Canadian solution providers.

As more investment flows into Canadian AI infrastructure and platforms, who’s going to help customers deploy those technologies, integrate them with existing systems, secure them and manage them over time?

That’s where this development becomes interesting for the channel.

The investment is about building Canadian AI capacity. Turning that capacity into useful enterprise deployments will require considerably more than the models and infrastructure themselves.

Next, Arrow Electronics is expanding its role in managed services with a new offering built around NetApp Keystone.

Arrow announced Thursday that it’s introducing managed storage services for NetApp Keystone, building on its existing Partner XaaS offering.

The new service adds a layer of operational support around consumption-based storage.

That includes lifecycle management, proactive monitoring, capacity and performance optimization, cyber resilience, data protection and ongoing service reviews.

Arrow says it’s the first distributor to offer this kind of managed storage service.

And the interesting part of the announcement is what it says about the changing role of distribution.

For years, distributors have helped partners with financing, logistics, procurement and, increasingly, cloud marketplaces and subscription management.

But as more infrastructure moves toward consumption-based models, partners also need help with the ongoing work of operating and supporting those services.

That’s where Arrow is looking to play a larger role.

The idea is that a solution provider or MSP can expand its managed storage business without having to build every operational capability from scratch.

And that could make it easier for more partners to participate in storage-as-a-service opportunities.

There are still some details we’d want to clarify for Canadian partners, particularly around local availability and commercial terms.

But the broader trend is clear: distribution is increasingly moving beyond enabling the transaction and into enabling the service itself.

And finally today, agentic security company 7AI says its Technology Alliance Program has reached two hundred integrations.

The company announced the milestone Thursday, describing it as an important expansion of the ecosystem supporting its AI-driven security operations platform.

Those integrations span a wide range of technologies, including endpoint security, identity, email, cloud platforms, SIEM and SOAR systems, ticketing tools, threat intelligence and vulnerability management.

And the idea is to allow 7AI’s agents to investigate and respond to security events using information from the tools customers already have in place.

That’s an important point, because most enterprise security environments are anything but simple.

Customers have accumulated years of investments in different security products, data sources and operational processes.

And introducing agentic security doesn’t necessarily mean they want to replace all of that infrastructure.

For partners, that creates an opportunity around integration and modernization.

Instead of approaching every customer with a complete replacement project, solution providers and managed security service providers can look at how AI-driven security operations might work across an existing environment.

7AI says nearly forty-five percent of its sales pipeline now originates through partners.

That’s a company-reported figure, but it helps explain why 7AI is investing so heavily in its partner and technology alliance ecosystem.

The larger lesson is that agentic security is becoming as much an integration and services challenge as a technology challenge.

And that’s a potentially interesting place for the channel to build value.

You can find more details on all three stories at ChannelBuzz.ca.

And before we go, a couple of notes on In The Channel.

Later today on In The Channel, we’ve got my conversation with Chris Fabes, president of TD SYNNEX Canada, recorded at last week’s Inspire Canada conference in Toronto.

We discuss where Chris sees the strongest near-term opportunities for Canadian partners, including cloud, cybersecurity and the changing economics of AI.

It’s an interesting look at the Canadian market from the perspective of one of the country’s largest technology distributors.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, Friday’s In The Channel featured my conversation with Glenn Kaul of CDW Canada, recorded at Cisco Partner Summit in Vancouver.

Glenn offers a solution-provider perspective on how AI is changing infrastructure demand, how security threats are reshaping customer requirements, and what AI could mean for the economics of professional services.

Both conversations are available through ChannelBuzz.ca and wherever you get your podcasts.

That’s The Buzz for Monday, November 2. I’m Robert Dutt. Thanks for listening, and have a great day.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

Over the last week, we’ve been bringing you conversations from Cisco Partner Summit 2026 in Vancouver, where Cisco laid out its vision for how artificial intelligence, security, and an increasingly connected technology platform will reshape the opportunities available to its partners.

What does that vision look like from the perspective of a major solution provider? And how are the changes being driven by AI already affecting the way partners work with their customers and build their businesses?

Those are some of the questions I explored with Glenn Kaul at CDW Canada when we sat down at Partner Summit.

Glenn has a particularly interesting perspective on how AI is changing the market, and not always in the ways you might expect.

We discuss how demand for AI infrastructure has disrupted traditional IT purchasing patterns, how increasingly sophisticated security threats are forcing solution providers to rethink the way they deliver their services, and how AI itself could change the economics of professional services.

We also get into some of the emerging opportunities around managing AI consumption costs, the growing importance of data sovereignty for Canadian customers, and what Cisco’s ongoing integration of Splunk means for partners and their customers.

It’s a conversation that goes beyond the announcements of Partner Summit to explore what these changes actually mean for the business of a solution provider.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Glenn Kaul from CDW Canada.

Robert Dutt: Glenn, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Glenn Kaul: Glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Robert Dutt: Let’s start big picture. You’ve been here at Partner Summit the last couple of days, hearing the announcements, talking with Cisco leadership.

What’s standing out to you? What are the things you’re taking away from Vancouver that will matter the most to CDW going forward?

Glenn Kaul: Well, there’s a couple of things.

One is that our customers’ need for having access to a platform and not just a number of point solutions, that’s not news. That’s been a trend that’s been going on for a few years, particularly in the security space, but in general.

I’d say that’s accelerating now.

And it’s accelerating for lots of reasons, including pressures that our clients have with budgets, managing price increases because of some of the component prices.

Their budgets have stayed the same, having some of the needs they have to have all the skills they need to go and run multiple platforms and systems, having visibility.

So I think that’s accelerating, number one.

And number two, I think the importance of networking, network refresh, and secure networks for AI defence as a general statement, but as a broader statement, just to have resilience and sovereignty in a secure network, that’s more important now than it was a year ago.

And it’s dramatic.

Robert Dutt: Is that accelerating too, especially the sovereignty side of things?

Glenn Kaul: The conversations are accelerating.

I think defining what sovereignty means — is it physical sovereignty? What does it mean in Canada? What does it mean elsewhere? Is it access? Is it controls?

People say, “Well, it’s all of the above.”

And so, well, how do you solve for that?

It’s an important conversation. The exact meaning of it and the implications for each customer are going to be, I think, segment- and use-case-specific.

Robert Dutt: And that’s where you guys get to have fun defining and scoping all that and making it stand up and real.

Glenn Kaul: Right.

And asking our customers, interviewing them and doing assessments, understanding what’s important to them.

For some customers, if it’s healthcare, it’s going to be different.

But look, we had a small regional public school system — or a midsize regional public school system — recently that we were responding to an RFP on, and they said, “This has to be sovereign.”

And we said, “Well, what does that mean?”

“The provider has to be sovereign. It has to prove to us that everything’s in Canada and it’s never going to leave Canada.”

We said, “Well, hang on a second. That’s about eight conversations in one.”

They wouldn’t have even asked that before.

And this isn’t the federal government asking. This is a small school system.

Robert Dutt: Yeah, yeah.

The three big messages that I keep taking away from this week are the push around AI, security, and the evolution of the partner ecosystem and partner program.

When you look at those priorities through CDW’s lens, where do you see the biggest opportunities to grow the business right now?

Glenn Kaul: It’s secure networking and AI defence.

And these are related items.

The new partner program has been announced for some time.

We’re very fortunate, and I think the scale partners are fortunate, in that we have the resources and more specializations and master specializations than anyone in the country.

And so we have the breadth and depth of the resources we need.

It’s a question of, within that very broad portfolio, making sure we focus on the right things that are important to our customers and that fuel our growth.

Robert Dutt: One of the things that I keep hearing is that AI is changing what customers need from you guys in the partner base.

Jeetu Patel talked about the need to rethink business processes rather than just layering AI onto existing workflows, for example.

Is that consistent with what you’re seeing and what customers are either looking for or ultimately needing, whether they’re looking for it or not?

And how does what you’ve learned and heard here change the conversations you’re having with customers around that?

Glenn Kaul: Well, first of all, I’d say every time somebody says AI, which we hear frequently, I always ask, “What’s the word before or the word after AI?”

Because what are we talking about?

Are we talking about how we use AI internally? How Cisco uses AI internally? How the tools, and particularly the network and security tools, have AI embedded in them to make our lives easier and our customers’ lives easier?

Or are we talking about defence against AI threats?

Are we talking about their automation and their productivity?

And the answer is it’s all of the above.

So I think every time we get into one of these conversations, I always want to start to decompose it a little bit to understand what about AI we’re talking about.

At CDW, we think about AI in four different ways.

We think about it internally. We think about it for our customers. We think about it for our partners. And we think about it for our coworkers in terms of their own personal productivity.

We have four executive leaders with four different streams that are well coordinated as we move that forward.

The same thing applies to our customers, and the same thing applies to the partner quadrant of that.

And I’d also say it’s different by segment.

Our small business and smaller commercial customers are just exploring very basic AI productivity tool uses.

Whether they’re using Microsoft Copilot in many cases or, in the smallest businesses, using Google Gemini, they’re starting with the very basics of productivity.

And then some of our larger clients are doing more inference-style work and modelling.

And some of our really large clients are contributing to frontier AI models, but are probably more concerned in Canada about AI defence and sovereignty.

So the conversation is different depending not just on the size of the organization, but what kind of organization it is.

If it’s critical infrastructure or if it’s a high-privacy or high-security environment, the conversation changes a little bit.

And so that means our team needs to be really well educated and have enough expertise across the board to be able to engage in the initial conversation, but then to be able to very quickly bring in the deep subject-matter experts, depending on what the need is, to go and take it five levels deeper.

Robert Dutt: And I imagine in some cases, probably not the folks who are contributing to the frontier-level models, but for some of those customers, that’s going to be a matter of education too.

Glenn Kaul: It is.

It’s funny, people talk about Mythos still.

And I say, look, stop talking about Mythos, because it just leads to the possible retort or conversation about, “Well, there hasn’t been that massive breach because of Mythos.”

And that’s not the point.

The point is two or three things.

One is the ability to find vulnerabilities quickly.

And the cycle time to find them is — look at PHP last week.

That was discovered by friendly AI tools because they were able to scan environments and code quickly to understand what the vulnerability was.

So we’ll see more of them, and they’ll be found faster.

Secondly, they can be propagated more widely and quickly because they’ll be well known.

And PHP is another good example of that.

And third, the defences aren’t so obvious in every case.

And finally, I think maybe one of the more significant pieces is that you don’t have to be a super-engineer expert anymore to be a threat actor.

My technical skills are pretty limited, but I have enough information now to be able to ask a model for instructions to do something that might be nefarious.

And that wasn’t the case even a year ago.

Robert Dutt: Right. Especially the pace part of that.

The bad news is that these exploits are coming around faster or being discovered much faster. The good news is the defences are also coming online faster.

How is that changing how you guys think about your security business and the pace at which it has to iterate, respond, and meet customer needs?

Glenn Kaul: There’s a great quote in one of the sessions today that said, “We used to do annual system health checkups.”

And it’s like, well, annual is no longer, because now it’s daily, now it’s automated, now it’s ongoing.

If you think about that, again, in the last few months or year, we’ve gone from “Let’s do an annual assessment of our environments to see what the vulnerabilities might be,” or quarterly patching updates.

This is now a daily and hourly activity.

It has to be quite agile to respond to fast-moving new threat vectors.

Think about how fast that’s changed in just a few months.

So the way we approach things is less about designing things up front and long implementations.

We have to rapidly transform to being as agile as the threat landscape is.

Robert Dutt: And resilient, I would imagine. Or the customers have to be as resilient.

Glenn Kaul: Absolutely.

We talk about secure networking as being one of the big, significant opportunities for us, but defences for our customers and where we can bring some expertise to our clients.

Data resilience is a big part of that too.

And we’re seeing a significant increase in dialogue and demand around just the data resilience portion of it.

And even microsegmentation.

Just assuming somebody gets into somebody’s environment. We used to spend so much time making sure they didn’t.

Now we have to assume they’re going to.

Robert Dutt: That’s right.

Glenn Kaul: And now we say, when they do, how can we protect against lateral movement and east-west traffic?

How do we protect the data and make sure that we can be up and running quickly, even if we’ve isolated the environment?

Again, these are all important security principles, but it’s a significant departure in terms of importance and emphasis from what we had just a few months ago.

Robert Dutt: In conversations about partner economics, we’re hearing a lot about the emphasis on lifecycle services, customer experience, recurring revenue.

How do you see the balance between the traditional infrastructure sales business and ongoing services evolving at CDW, as everyone’s on this journey to find the right balance or the right business model around the combination of the two?

Glenn Kaul: Well, services have always been an important part of our business.

Six years ago, we acquired Scalar Decisions specifically because they had, in part, a very significant services business as well as a SOC and a NOC.

It’s been part of our strategy at CDW globally, and particularly in Canada, for seven or eight years.

It’s increasing in importance, although the services landscape is also changing.

Do we need to hire a solution integrator or technical experts to do firewall rule changes as much anymore? And how much of that’s going to be AI-driven?

So it will increase the reliance on companies like us for more of the design and the expert services than the basic services.

So it changes as well.

But it’s for us to provide value to our customers and help them with outcomes.

I would say we don’t sell technology at customers. We create buyers, and we create demand with our customers because they trust us.

And that doesn’t happen because we are selling products.

It happens because we’re involved in the ideation, the solution architecture, and the services implementation, and in many cases, the operations.

Robert Dutt: So back to your point about what do you mean when you say AI, this is one of those things that covers a couple of those aspects.

Do you find that AI is changing how you price and deliver services, or is it primarily creating new services to offer in different ways?

Glenn Kaul: It’s creating new services to offer.

We might retire some of our services if we decide that they are effectively commoditized.

We’re not at that point yet, but I could see that coming.

I think we need to be prepared for the fact that it’s changing.

At the moment, most of the services that we’re providing around AI are either enablement conversations for some of the smaller customers, or it’s data analysis, data reconciliation, and hygiene conversations to get data right to be able to do AI.

And increasingly, it’s about privacy, security, and sovereignty.

And I think the next one is going to be tokenomics.

It’s going to be: How do we help our clients understand and manage, as part of their data operating model, the token costs and when to use which technology environments for which purposes?

Because all of a sudden, just like a lot of consumption-based models, including cloud, you could wind up with a big bill at the end of six months or the end of three months and not realize how much it was costing versus your budget.

And for small organizations, that’s going to be hard.

We can get ahead of it with our customers by showing them, “This is how you’re going to consume these.”

I heard a great quote, and I have to credit it to one of our esteemed competitors, who said, “I’ve learned there’s a big difference between a free beer and a free puppy.”

Robert Dutt: That’s fair.

In terms of internally, I think you touched on this a little bit in terms of what services are going to be things that you offer versus what’s going to become a baked-in part.

For example, you gave firewall updates. That can be increasingly baked in.

How do you think about AI internally represented in the services that you bring to market?

Glenn Kaul: That’s something we’re exploring every day.

Our first act is to make sure we have all the right tools and training that our technical experts need to be able to explore it themselves.

And the second piece is where we are now.

We have 100 percent of our 1,100 Canadian coworkers, sales or technical or administrative, with at least some foundational training in the AI productivity tool suites.

Sometimes they’re very basic ones.

But we have 100 percent compliance in that, and that took some effort.

The next step now is how do we use it in our everyday work?

And for our service delivery professionals, who are naturally curious, and especially the security ones are particularly curious — that’s part of the hiring credentials, curiosity — they have been given great latitude to figure out, in the course of doing work as opposed to in a lab, how they can use the AI tools available to us to have either higher-quality or more efficient service delivery outcomes for our customers.

And we’re right in the middle of that.

There’s no destination to that. That’s going to be an ongoing evolution.

We have to make sure that every one of our coworkers, particularly in the service delivery part of the organization, is making that evolution and the constant modernization of workflows part of everyday life.

It’s not like, “Here’s a new way of doing things.”

It’s, “Here’s a new way of thinking about things.”

Robert Dutt: You touched on tokenomics a little earlier.

I’m curious where the customer conversation is at with that, particularly how it’s coming to you.

How often is it coming to you in the form of a customer saying, “We have a problem here,” versus you being in front of it and being able to guide expectations around token costs and managing that?

Glenn Kaul: It comes two or three different ways.

There is no question that there’s the, “I just started this, I got these bills, I need to figure out how to rationalize this.”

Robert Dutt: Suddenly Claude owns my house.

Glenn Kaul: Exactly.

And the CFO has a little chat with me about the budget depletion.

That’s one avenue.

A second one is, “I’m about to deploy these things. I’ve now got my licences, or I’ve now got the sandbox environment we’ve set up to do some of this experimentation. What do I need to think about?”

And so that’s part of the collaborative, proactive approach.

And the third is just general education as we’re educating them about the art of the possible with AI-enabled tool suites.

Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about what customers are actually spending money on right now.

There’s obviously enormous interest in AI, whatever that may mean to them, depending on where they’re at and what they’re doing.

But there’s a lot of pressure around budgets, security, and demonstrating ROI.

Where are you seeing customers move most from experimentation, dipping their toe in the water, into meaningful investments right now?

Glenn Kaul: I’d say what’s really interesting is that the year was not what we expected in terms of our calendar 2026 year.

A year ago, we knew that AI was an incoming trend.

What we didn’t know, even 10 months ago, was the impact it was going to have.

Looking back now, we could have predicted it, but the impact it was going to have on customers’ budgets.

It actually has nothing to do with AI directly, necessarily.

It was the unintended consequence of the huge demand from the large AI factories that were being built by the hyperscalers and neoclouds and others that drove DRAM prices up.

So what happened, starting in late December last year, but really early to mid-January, was that we started seeing the price increases coming in.

Eight percent here, 10 percent there, on every laptop, on every desktop, on every server.

And of course, anything that has a chip or memory in it was impacted, just not as much or as fast.

People always ask, “Well, did customers just go and pre-buy and buy in advance?”

Some of them did.

More importantly, I think customers changed their buying priorities in terms of the critical things they’re going to need over the next year or two, in part because of price increases and in part because of the subsequent concern about availability.

“If I need this capacity in storage, I need this capacity for compute, AI or not, AI-related or not, I had better get my orders in.”

And so some of the longer-range planning and outcome-based investments that our clients wanted to make were really put on hold a little bit because they had to repurpose not only the dollars, but also their time and the things they needed to make sure they could operate later in the year.

We saw six or seven months of rapidly shifting customer priorities.

Sometimes big projects that were for 2028 or 2029 needs got put on hold a little bit or deprioritized.

In some cases, some of their 2027 needs became a higher priority, in significant part because of prices, but also because of concerns about availability.

“If I just can’t operate unless I have this much storage available to me in December of the year, and we think there’s going to be supply chain constraints…”

Which haven’t materialized as much as people may have feared, but they’re still there.

The ETAs, the elapsed time from ordering even a custom-configured laptop, used to be two weeks. Now it’s 16 in some cases.

They had to be prioritized because of concerns about operational demands first.

And now we’re back into the conversation around what do you need to secure and harden, or to enable your business for future growth.

It was interesting how fast that changed over the last few months.

Robert Dutt: Has that pressure moderated in a way to a point where customers are taking stock of where they’re at and reprioritizing some of those things that got backburnered back when RAMageddon was really running wild?

Glenn Kaul: Well, RAMageddon, yes.

I think that’s true.

I think we’re in a place now where there are more thoughtful conversations and planned conversations.

We do a lot of executive briefings with our customers, where we bring in our customers from all across the country and sometimes internationally.

We’ll spend a day or two with them on whatever the agenda item is for them and bring in all of our experts.

Those are back on and have been rescheduled, and we’re doing three times as many now as we were doing a year ago.

So you can see us being back in the planning cycles with customers, whereas it was reaction and response in that February to probably May timeframe.

Robert Dutt: Kind of like COVID, but in a different way.

Glenn Kaul: Exactly, right?

And COVID was different. Everybody had to figure out how to work from home.

And then once we figured out how to get everybody working from home, we took the opportunity — our clients took the opportunity — to refresh the networks in their offices because nobody was there.

Those things happened within weeks of each other.

So we’re in the same kind of rapid-response and agility place now, but just for different reasons.

Robert Dutt: You’re in an interesting place in that you’re part of an international organization.

Obviously, CDW is active around the world in many different markets.

I’m curious if there are any specific-to-Canada peculiarities, opportunities, or challenges that you’re seeing in the Canadian market that are different from what you’re hearing from your peers around the world.

Glenn Kaul: I meet with my counterparts in both the U.S. and in the U.K., where our international operations outside of North America are managed.

We were all in Chicago last week doing 2027 planning, and we had a lot of conversations around this.

It was interesting.

As every segment of the company around the world started to present their 2027 plans, we saw the similarities all across the world.

Now, there are nuances in federal government in the U.S. versus federal government in Canada. There’s no question there’s nuance.

But there’s much more consistency.

I would say that security is important globally.

The sovereignty conversation, even though sovereignty is just as important in the U.S., is not as much part of the first conversation as it is in Europe and in Canada.

Robert Dutt: With Cisco bringing Splunk more deeply into its security and observability strategy, how do you guys think about Splunk and that business?

Are you very active there?

And do you see that creating new opportunities for CDW to bring together capabilities that customers have traditionally bought and managed separately?

Glenn Kaul: Absolutely.

Splunk is a fantastic technology.

It has expanded rapidly over the years through both development and acquisition and tucking in new capabilities.

And it was a material acquisition, both monetarily and strategically, for Cisco.

It’s complicated technology. It’s complicated licensing models.

And it doesn’t just tuck right into Cisco.

It’s taken them some time, but it’s been time well spent, and they’re being thoughtful about how they integrate it.

How do we get the customer-facing experts for both Splunk and Cisco to connect better so we’re not having, to your point, two different conversations? You’re having one related conversation.

And we’re at that juncture point now.

They still have some work to do, but you can see even in the product development, which is probably a little bit ahead of the field integration, there are more Splunk conversations happening as part of a Cisco conversation.

Whereas before, it was either a Cisco or Splunk, or a Cisco and Splunk conversation.

You can see it happening right now.

It’ll still take some time, but the product development is probably ahead of the field implementation on that.

Robert Dutt: What’s driving the unity of that conversation right now?

Is that a function of the integration being more mature? Is that a function of you guys getting out ahead of it, Cisco messaging, customer awareness?

Glenn Kaul: I think it’s all of the above.

But I’d say from a pure financial point of view for Cisco, making a massive investment in Splunk, there’s no point in doing that and having it as a separate operating entity or software stack or anything else.

Because as Cisco’s ecosystem turns increasingly into software and centrally managed and controlled and visible capabilities like Cloud Control and IQ and other things, data is a huge part of that, and Splunk is a huge part of data.

So commercially, it makes sense for them.

Logically, it makes sense for our customers, and therefore it makes sense to us.

Robert Dutt: From CDW’s point of view, what would be the next step that would unlock the most value for both Cisco and yourselves in bringing Splunk to market and making it a bigger part of the overall business?

Glenn Kaul: I’d say for our largest and medium-sized customers, including a lot of public sector customers, the enterprise agreements.

It’s been possible for the last year or so to include Splunk in an enterprise agreement, but it’s been manual work and not easy, understandably, because they’re very different licensing models.

But that’s now a matter of course, and our largest client is about to include Splunk in their enterprise agreement in the next few months.

I’d say that’s going to be the number-one piece of it: making sure that the enterprise agreement really means enterprise agreement, and it is the entire portfolio, including Splunk.

Robert Dutt: Yeah, that would make sense. That’s a big unlock.

Last one for me.

If we’re having this conversation again next year in Las Vegas at Partner Summit 2027, what do you hope to have accomplished over the next year?

What would tell you that CDW’s Cisco business has successfully capitalized on the opportunities Cisco’s talking about this week, and that Cisco has made them real for you guys as well, looking at both lenses?

Glenn Kaul: I think in the broadest sense, it’s the increased understanding by all of our professionals about the platform, and the truly connected platform.

Not just the lowercase-p platform, where it says we have, under the same brand, a number of different integratable capabilities.

To show that it really is a single pane of glass, and the visibility, and how all these technologies interoperate.

I think in general, we’ll see massive progress on that.

But I’ll be most pleased to see that we’ve helped our clients with Cisco harden their environments, have better visibility, and really have realized the first important next step in secure networking and all their related capabilities.

Robert Dutt: All right. Once again, thanks for taking the time, and I hope the rest of the stay in Vancouver is a good one for you.

Glenn Kaul: My pleasure. Thank you.

Robert Dutt: There you have it, Glenn Kaul from CDW Canada, speaking with me at Cisco Partner Summit 2026 in Vancouver.

I’d like to thank Glenn for his time, and thank you for listening today.

One of the things that stood out for me from this conversation is just how many different ways AI is already changing the solution provider business.

It’s creating new opportunities, certainly, but it’s also changing customer priorities, putting pressure on existing service models, and introducing new challenges around everything from security to consumption costs.

And as Glenn points out, those changes aren’t happening in isolation.

They’re playing out against a backdrop of evolving customer expectations around resilience, sovereignty, and the need to get more value from increasingly complex technology environments.

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I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

We’re continuing our coverage of Cisco Partner Summit 2026 in Vancouver, where Cisco has been laying out its vision for a new generation of partner opportunities around artificial intelligence, security, and an increasingly integrated technology platform.

But with so many announcements, new capabilities, and changes to the partner program, there’s an important question for Canadian partners: Where do you start, and how do you turn this into a profitable business?

That’s what we’re exploring in today’s episode, as I’m joined by Raj Juneja and Erin Gertner from Cisco Canada.

We discuss some of the biggest opportunities they’re seeing for Canadian partners, including how existing Cisco networking and security partners can begin building a business around Splunk, and how Cisco IQ could become the foundation of new advisory and lifecycle services.

We also get into the evolution of the Cisco 360 Partner Program, including some of the early feedback from Canadian partners and what they need to be doing now to protect and grow their profitability as the program continues to evolve.

And we look at Cisco’s new Ecosystem Deal Registration initiative, which recognizes that the partners influencing customer decisions aren’t necessarily the same partners ultimately selling the technology.

Finally, we discuss where Canadian customers are spending their technology budgets, and why Cisco sees an opportunity for partners to rethink their traditional network refresh rather than simply replacing what’s already there.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Raj Juneja and Erin Gertner.

Robert Dutt: Erin, Raj, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Erin Gertner: Thank you for having us.

Robert Dutt: I guess let’s start with the obvious, given where we’re sitting right now. What does it mean to the Cisco Canada team and to your partners to have home-ice advantage this week?

And I guess I should add, between Vancouver once before and Montreal, we’re back on home ice.

Erin Gertner: Yeah, I think it’s just such a privilege to have everybody join us in Vancouver.

I think I can speak for myself and probably on behalf of Raj. We’re such proud Canadians, and Cisco Canada had such a fantastic year this year, and we have so much to celebrate.

We’re so grateful for our partners. So I think being back in Canada, and specifically in Vancouver, has been amazing for us.

And it’s been really nice to hear feedback from the partners as they’re walking by, saying how much they love the city and that they’ve gotten to explore.

If you look out the window, it’s so picturesque when you get to look at the mountains. I think our city shows very well, so I’m very happy to be here.

Raj Juneja: Yeah, I think I would echo everything that Erin is saying.

I’ve heard nothing but positive sentiment about coming to Canada and what they’re surrounded by here.

This venue in downtown Vancouver, overlooking the ocean. What can you say?

It’s beautiful, and it brings joy to folks who are visiting for the first time. It’s a good representation of what Canada has to offer.

Robert Dutt: Now, with Vancouver 2010, there was the strategy leading up to it to position the team well for that.

Was there a similar long-term strategy behind getting Cisco Canada to have that great year, with Partner Summit coming here? I ask entirely in jest.

Erin Gertner: And own the podium!

That was great.

I think we just had a great opportunity this year in Cisco Canada, and being able to show off our success here is an even bigger blessing.

I think we’re always intentional around our success, and we’ve been asked to replicate it year on year.

If you hear everybody talk about the notion of durable growth, Raj talks a lot about that, and growth on growth.

We’re proud of the year we had, and I think we wish we had this year again next year so we can demonstrate another growth-on-growth year.

But we’ll be in luck even if we’re doing this in Vegas.

Robert Dutt: Yes, even if we’re doing it in Vegas.

We’ve heard a lot this week about the vision around the next generation of the ecosystem, particularly around AI, security, and services.

When you look at the announcements through a Canadian lens, what stands out as particularly important?

What do you see as the biggest opportunities for Canadian partners in this moment, especially the stuff that’s been talked about here this week?

Erin Gertner: I think that Ecosystem Deal Registration that was announced this week is particularly interesting for our Canadian partners.

Raj and I were actually talking about this on the way here.

That’s something Splunk has always done very well, and it was something that I don’t think Cisco had completely figured out.

But we know as the world evolves, we’re seeing different types of partners spending time advising our customers, helping them figure out how to build AI, how to build out a secure network, and how to drive digital transformation.

And the fact that we can have multiple partners in an opportunity delivering value to a customer, and each of those partners be rewarded in some capacity, I think that’s a really exciting opportunity.

The other feedback we’ve gotten from partners over the last few days has been around Cisco IQ.

I think they see the value of that platform, and they truly understand how to monetize that and drive value for customers.

Specifically, when they’re starting to think about network modernization and understanding what their infrastructure looks like.

For a lot of customers, that’s been a little bit of a black hole over the years.

And now, when we think about the complexity of patching and all the other things that our customers are being tasked with on a daily basis, the fact that our partners can play an important role, I think, is very important.

The last piece is SCI. Chuck announced that on stage, so sovereign critical infrastructure.

That is a big part of Cisco Canada’s strategy this year, just given what’s going on in the world and what we’re hearing from customers.

We’re really excited about the opportunity to be able to deliver applications and some of our core infrastructure in a sovereign fashion.

And I think our partners are very interested in that as well because they’re hearing it from customers and from the government.

Anything to add on your side?

Raj Juneja: No, I think you’ve hit all the top points.

I think the capabilities around the integration with Cloud Control and Cisco IQ coming together, that’s a great opportunity.

Not only for our customers to take advantage of something that they’ve been asking for over a long period through Cloud Control, but then the IQ capabilities for our partners.

Going back to what Erin said, I think we have a couple of capabilities, and the fact that everything is going to be built within Cloud Control speaks to the opportunities that lie ahead for both our customers and partners.

Robert Dutt: A couple of follow-ups there.

One, on the non-transacting partners: How realized is that opportunity in terms of identifying the folks who are going to be that base today?

Obviously, the incentives are now in place to activate.

I’m curious how much of it you think is from folks who you already know, and how much of it is from folks who have yet to be surfaced in the Cisco partner ecosystem.

Erin Gertner: I think that’s an interesting question.

I think we have a lot to learn about who is truly influencing our customers.

Again, I think Splunk always did a great job of truly understanding what the landscape looked like in their customers and who was helping to influence a decision or a strategy.

For our account teams, they’ve always focused on the transacting partner and maybe didn’t have as broad of a view around who is behind the scenes.

We know of the GSIs, and we see a lot of them doing advisory work on behalf of our customers.

But then if you look at all the various architectures, security being one where there’s often somebody in there doing consultative work for customers.

Now that we have an incentive in place, I think that gives us the opportunity to broaden our ecosystem and start developing conversations and relationships with companies that we haven’t historically done a lot with.

So I think it’s going to be a big learning opportunity for us and our teams, but we have something to talk to them about now, which we didn’t have in the past.

Robert Dutt: And on the other side, on IQ, clearly Jeetu was talking about this as someplace where he wants partners to build a practice around it.

Not just a product in the lineup, but a foundational part.

Obviously, early innings of that particular game, but I’m curious if you have any thoughts on what you see as the most likely or most obvious first step for partners to start down that road.

Erin Gertner: I think they need to get comfortable with IQ themselves and really understand the power of it, and develop a unique offering around it.

Now that we have role-based access and they can play a role in a customer actually going through the adoption of IQ, I think it’s going to present an opportunity for them to figure that out.

There’s an obvious play in helping customers take an inventory of their network and get a good handle on what the totality of their environment looks like.

For many customers, even going and doing a renewal is a very complicated value proposition for them, because maybe they don’t understand what their topology looks like, or maybe they don’t understand where they have vulnerabilities or where they’re behind in security patching.

And IQ gives them that peripheral view of it.

But I think our partners can build a really interesting service around what the advisory looks like.

What’s the next generation? How do we go build a net-new network? Or how do we get ahead of any vulnerabilities and patches when they haven’t historically been able to do that?

Robert Dutt: I wanted to spend some time on Splunk because that’s another area that got a lot of main-stage attention and a lot of “pay attention to this” kind of love from the leadership team.

I think it’s an interesting opportunity for a lot of Cisco’s existing partner base.

A lot of partners have built successful businesses around networking, infrastructure, and security, but may not have that experience with Splunk today.

Why should those partners be looking seriously at the opportunity?

What’s the potential they’re leaving on the table if they aren’t integrating Splunk into what they’re doing today?

Raj Juneja: I mean, if you think about what’s going on in the market right now, and what the underlying most valuable asset is right now, it’s data.

And ultimately, whether it’s securing it, whether it’s enabling AI, being able to provide customers the governance, visibility, and security capabilities through a common platform is a competitive advantage that they now have if they take advantage of it.

As you just mentioned, the investments that we’ve made to incorporate the capabilities of Splunk, even within our own portfolio, speak to the strong capabilities that they themselves can take advantage of in building practices.

Going back to customers who don’t want to build it themselves, that’s where they’ve built their revenues for many years, around managed services and professional services.

And I think that Splunk is a great data platform to enable that.

The thing with Splunk that’s so powerful is that traditionally, people who have leveraged Splunk may have leveraged log aggregation or log collection and may not understand the full value proposition.

Or they may leverage it from a security standpoint or a security use case.

Knowing that the same data you harness can actually give you the opportunity to have a business-level conversation around things like tokenomics and things around your whole estate that will give you visibility and allow you to make business decisions, that itself speaks to opportunities for partners to take advantage of.

Robert Dutt: How much of the opportunity is around selling Splunk itself versus making Splunk a way to create additional value around the Cisco solutions that they’re already selling?

Raj Juneja: I don’t know if I’d quantify it.

It’s going to be basically no different than the traditional Cisco team, or people who make investments in Cisco.

They’ll understand the opportunity in terms of the capabilities that Splunk provides to what they already have.

From a Splunk perspective, I think what’s interesting is that bringing in that data from the Cisco estate that they own provides them the ability to advise and leverage the capabilities of things like IQ and things like defence, and look at everything from a Cloud Control perspective.

And give them a broader value proposition back to those customers, as opposed to something that they’ve traditionally only been looking at in a siloed fashion, if that makes sense.

Robert Dutt: Yeah, no, it does.

So if I’m a Canadian Cisco partner with a solid networking and security business, but I haven’t really engaged with Splunk, what’s the first step?

Where do I start building that business without having to make a giant upfront investment into it?

Raj Juneja: I think first is understanding the capabilities of the platform.

Taking advantage and demonstrating to yourselves that you can leverage the data that you’re collecting already from your customers, your pre-existing customers, and how you take that data and turn it into business intelligence that you can then provide back to them in terms of an offering.

So that could come from traditional IT, come from OT, and be able to then turn that around and give them an opportunity to look at offering security practices, offering observability practices, looking at the data and leveraging it as a whole.

But I would say the first thing is understanding the power that you have with Splunk.

So if you wanted to get started, I think it’s bringing our team in to give them a demonstration around the simplicity of first collecting that log data with Splunk and the power that you can get from the data once you’ve collected it.

Robert Dutt: One of the messages we’ve heard repeatedly here is that AI is creating opportunities for partners that go beyond selling the infrastructure, selling AI itself.

You’re talking about how partners can help customers rethink workflows, build solutions, and deliver services.

How ready is the average Canadian partner to take advantage of that?

And what are you doing to help partners level up their game and meet that opportunity?

Erin Gertner: From the conversations I’ve had, every partner seems to be in a different state of readiness or is taking a very different approach, which I love because I think it creates a lot of unique differentiation for each.

We were actually just in a meeting with a partner, and we were talking about use cases as an example.

We do a great job of building the underlying technology, but the role of a partner with many of our customers is helping them really understand where they can optimize, where they can drive use cases, or where they can help customers realize true value from AI.

We’ve got teams in there doing enablement from a technology perspective and helping them understand how we can create a resilient network, how we can secure AI workloads, how we can help them build.

But our best partners are the ones who are really thinking about how they deliver unique value and how they take the power of their entire ecosystem and their portfolio and bring it to customers.

We’re also seeing service providers really thinking about sovereignty with AI.

And they’re thinking about all kinds of different models to help customers be successful, depending on how they want to consume technology.

Whether it’s GPU as a service, whether it’s inferencing at the edge, whether it’s building out a sovereign cloud or building out sovereign applications.

Everybody’s taken a very different approach, and we’ve had a lot of ideation sessions with customers, helping them think about: Who is your customer base? What do you want to deliver to the market? What are you good at? And how do you build a profitable practice around that?

So customers are looking to you as a thought leader versus just another technology provider.

Robert Dutt: It feels like at the same time that some of these things are becoming more concrete and more clear in terms of building a business, it’s going off in so many directions at once.

When I was chatting with Glenn Kaul a few minutes ago in here and asked about AI as well, it depends what you mean by AI.

Because there’s AI, what my customers are doing with AI, what I’m doing internally with AI for my business, what I’m doing internally with my customers with AI, there’s what I’m doing with my vendor partners.

There are so many different aspects to it.

I think your point is well received about there being so many different paths, and there’s not one easy answer in terms of what it looks like for a partner.

Erin Gertner: For sure.

AI means something different to everybody, just like sovereignty means something different to everybody.

Every company is on its own journey to realize value, whether that’s for its own internal use or whether it’s for helping customers be successful with their goals and ambitions as well.

Robert Dutt: We’ve heard, obviously, a lot about the evolution of Cisco 360, the changes to the incentives, and the growing importance of different types of partner contributions.

When Canadian partners go home from Vancouver, or cross town if that happens to be the case for those in the Lower Mainland, and start looking at those changes, what should they be paying particular attention to?

Where are the opportunities to do things differently as a result of where you guys are going programmatically?

Erin Gertner: I think continuing to build out those adoption practices and managed practices.

As we rolled out Cisco 360, we wanted to make it a very manageable transition for our partners.

So we’re still paying the majority of our rebate structure on the land motion to make sure our partners are still highly profitable with us, and to give them time to start to build out some of the other motions and practices within their organizations.

So I would say continuing to build that out and getting good at that.

We’re seeing it especially as we’re selling more and more software. The importance of adoption and doing that well becomes increasingly more valuable for customers to really realize the potential of their investments.

We did a great job of protecting our partners for the first 18 months and making sure that they were going to stay above that 7.5 mark if they were already there, or at least holding that high-water mark.

But as they continue to evolve and we go back into a qualification period, we’re paying particular attention in Canada to our partner community to make sure they’re doing all the right things to set themselves up for success.

Once that 18 months lapses, we don’t want any of them to fall below where they are, because it’ll have a material impact on their profitability and working with us.

Robert Dutt: Any early, I hesitate to say it’s too early for a metric, but gut feelings, reactions, thoughts on how that’s landing and how partners are doing on meeting that mark?

Erin Gertner: I think partners have been pleasantly surprised as they got their first cheques from us and continued to work with us.

Change isn’t easy.

And this was the first big change we made to a program that was beloved by partners and profitable for partners for many, many years.

They understood it, and they knew how to make money with us.

And we changed the game a little bit. We had to.

But I think after all that transition and all the difficulty partners anticipated in getting there, a lot of them have been pleasantly surprised by where they landed.

And in all the conversations we’ve had with partners, I think they understand the why behind it.

Many of them feel like they are in a good place, and they have an understanding of where we’re going and how our sales teams are compensated.

You saw them get up on stage and actually share that information, and share how our incentives are aligned to that.

So I think the fact that those two things are aligned is really important for them because it means what they’re investing in, what they’re building, is what our teams care about.

And that alignment drives the right behaviour.

Robert Dutt: On the demand side, we talked about this a little bit six months ago, or now more, but obviously this is a fast-changing market.

Erin Gertner: Yes, it is.

Robert Dutt: Things evolve.

When you’re talking to Canadian customers, both of you, where are you seeing the strongest demand right now?

Is it infrastructure, security, modernization of networks, something else?

Where do you see the biggest opportunities at this moment and developing into the early parts of 2027?

Erin Gertner: I can answer from what I’m hearing from partners and customers, and then I’ll pass it over to Raj.

I still think secure networking is one of the biggest opportunities out there.

What worked a couple of years ago in terms of longevity of a network, or having a network that’s ready for agentic AI and AI workflows, it’s not the same.

And I think that has caused a lot of customers to think through how they keep up with patching, as an example.

Things we’ve heard from customers are that it’s consuming an enormous amount of time, effort, energy, and resources within their organizations.

And they’re looking for better ways to do that and get an inventory of where they are.

Security, obviously, is very top of mind for everybody, especially given what the security landscape looks like today and the vulnerabilities that have been identified in the broader landscape.

I don’t know if you have anything else.

Raj Juneja: Yeah, no, I think it’s spot on.

I think the network presents a huge opportunity, especially in the world of agents and the throughput that’s going on.

And so that obviously is what they’re seeing from a demand standpoint.

Coming through the network requires a different approach to management, if you will.

And I think that’s where the opportunity is that we’re taking full advantage of.

Robert Dutt: That chart that Jeetu showed with the difference between network consumption for chatbot AI versus agentic AI was, A, sobering, and B, if you’re in the business of selling networks, it looks like dollar signs in a big way.

Last one for me.

Looking ahead over the next year, what’s the one thing you’d most like to see Cisco Canada partners do differently as a result of what they’ve heard here at Partner Summit?

What would tell you that the Canadian partner is taking advantage of the opportunities out there if we’re doing this again next year in Las Vegas?

Raj Juneja: From my lens, I’d say it’s taking advantage of what we’ve highlighted here at Partner Summit this week.

Taking advantage of the capabilities of building on top of IQ and leveraging the capabilities they’ll see in the combination of IQ and Cloud Control.

So I’d say that.

And then something that we’re preaching to all our partners is that we have a large network refresh going on across Canada, especially with the demands of AI.

Let’s not just focus on like-for-like.

Let’s make sure we’re surrounding the network with all the capabilities we have to offer, whether it be from a security standpoint, an observability standpoint, everything that we have.

Let’s not just sell the network refresh the same way we have in the past.

Erin Gertner: I would say that cross-sell piece, or upsell, is very, very important.

Don’t just look at something for what it is today.

We’ve got buying vehicles, and there’s a ton of data that our partners can leverage to broaden deal size and broaden opportunities that they identify in our customer base.

And PXP, I always sort of joke, has almost too much data for our partners, but in the best possible way.

It really helps them identify what they can be doing better and helps them think bigger.

The other thing that we are very focused on in Canada is market share.

We want to go out and grow our market-share footprint, and we have incentives in place that our partners can leverage to help them do that, and they’re very lucrative.

So we’re trying a few new things here that we’re very excited about that we think will help our partners be much more profitable upfront.

Because we know how our partner sellers get paid, and we want to make sure that they’re able to leverage those programs to want to partner with us.

But we also want to go out and win.

We think we have a great portfolio, and we think we have the right tools to help partners be successful in winning.

And we want to take advantage of that opportunity this year.

So we’re very bullish on that.

Robert Dutt: All right. Once again, I appreciate you both taking the time.

Erin Gertner: Thank you.

Raj Juneja: Thank you for having us.

Robert Dutt: There you have it, Raj Juneja and Erin Gertner from Cisco Canada.

I’d like to thank Raj and Erin for their time, and thank you for listening.

One of the themes running through this year’s Partner Summit has been the idea that Cisco wants its partners to build more sophisticated businesses around its technology rather than simply selling more products.

And I think this conversation offers some useful starting points for Canadian partners, whether that’s finding new value in the data their customers are already generating, building services around Cisco IQ, or taking advantage of the changes Cisco is making to how it recognizes and rewards different kinds of partner contributions.

But there’s also a fairly straightforward message here.

As customers modernize their networks and prepare for AI, partners have an opportunity to do considerably more than replace existing infrastructure.

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I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.